Keep apart, keep apart, and preserve one’s soul alive—that is the teaching for the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within the world.

The speaker advocates a deliberate withdrawal from the pressures and vulgarities of contemporary society: “keep apart” is both a defensive posture and a moral discipline aimed at preserving the integrity of the inner life (“one’s soul alive”). The lament—“ill to have been born in these times”—suggests a sense of cultural decline or spiritual impoverishment in the modern world, a common fin-de-siècle anxiety. Yet the closing turn is not pure despair: even if the public world is degraded, one can construct a private realm of values, thought, and aesthetic or ethical seriousness—“a world within the world.” The quote thus frames solitude and inward cultivation as a strategy of survival and resistance.