358
PARTISAN REVIEW
But it is not possible simply to impose on the world a law that
everything should remain as of old, but that the new law giver should
be free. This would be not law, but arbitrariness, rebellion, self-con–
demnation.
November 2.
Vague hope, vague confidence.
An endless dreary Sunday afternoon-devouring whole years, an
afternoon consisting of years. Alternately despairing in the empty streets
and findinG calm on the couch. Sometimes astonishment at the almost
incessantly passing, colorless, senseless clouds. "You are reserved for a
great Monday!" "Well said, but this Sunday will never end."
December 6.
Two children, alone in the apartment, climbed into
a big chest, the lid fell shut, and unable to open it they were suffocated.
December 12.
Much suffering in thought.
I was startled from deep sleep. In the middle of the room, at a
little table by candlelight, sat a strange man. In the semi-darkness he
sat broad and heavy, his unbuttoned winter coat made him seem even
more so.
To think through in a more effective way:
Raabe on his deathbed, when his wife stroked his forehead: "This
is lovely."
The grandfather who laughs, with toothless mouth, at his grand–
child.
1922
1
anuary
16.
This last week it was like a collapse, as complete as
perhaps only that of one night two years ago; I have not experienced
any other instance like it. Everything seemed at an end, and today it
seems not at all different. It can be conceived in two ways, perhaps
simultaneously. First, collapse, impossibility of sleeping, impossibility of
being awake, impossibility of enduring life, more accurately the conti–
nuity of life. The clocks do not correspond, the inner one hurries on in
a devilish or demonic or at any rate inhuman way, the outer sluggishly .
keeps its usual pace. What else will come of it but that the two separate
worlds should split, and they do split, or at least tug at each other in
a frightful fashion. The frenzy of the inner movement may have various
causes, the most obvious being introspection that permits no idea to
come to rest, flushes up each one only to be itself pursued as matter
