Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself–in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else–means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

E. E. Cummings, ‘A Poet’s Advice to Students’, in George J. Firmage (ed.), E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany, New York, 1958, p. 13