Ben

It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that--), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way--. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are question, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer--. But, how can they, who have already flung themselves together, and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?

...ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity...

...if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it [irony], if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.

Read as little as possible of literary criticism--such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view.