360
PARTISAN REVIEW
hope of a barren woman. Yet it is the air in which I breathe, as long
as I am to breathe.
Without ancestors, without marriage, without progeny, with an
unbridled desire for ancestors, marriage, and progeny. All stretch out
their hands toward me: ancestors, marriage, and progeny, but from
a point far too remote from me.
There is an artificial, wretched substitute for all things: for an–
cestors, marriage, and progeny. One creates it amidst convulsions, and,
if not, one perishes of the convulsions. One perishes on account of the
hopelessness of the substitute.
The development was simple. When I was still satisfied, I wanted
to be dissatisfied, plunging, with all the means of the age and of the
tradition available to me, into dissatisfaction; and then I wanted to
be able to return. Thus I was always dissatisfied, even with my satis–
faction.
It
is odd how with sufficient systematization the comedy of
play-acting can become reality. My spiritual decline began with child–
ish, although childish-conscious, acting. For instance, I produced artifi–
cial twitches of my facial muscles, I stepped over the ditch with my
arms crossed behind my head. Childishly odious but successful game.
(It was the same with learning to write, except that this development
was later unfortunately blocked).
If
it is possible in this way to compel
misfortune to occur, it lihould be possible to coerce anything into occur–
ing. However much the development seems to refute me, and however
it contradicts my nature to think so, I absolutely cannot admit that the
beginnings of my misfortune had an inner necessity, they may have
had a necessity, but not an inner one, they came on the wing like flies,
and could have been driven away as easily as flies.
To say that you forsook me would be very unfair, but that I was
forsaken, and sometimes terribly so, is true.
January 27. Spindelmiihle.
Need to free myself from the misfor–
tune of the double seigh-in which clumsiness had a part-the broken
trunk, the wobbling table, the bad light, the impossibility of finding
quiet in the hotel during the afternoon, etc. This cannot be attained by
neglecting it, for it cannot be neglected, it can be attained only by
throwing in new forces. Of course, there may be surprises here; the
most disconsolate man must grant that according to experience some–
thing can come out of nothing, that out of the dilapidated pigsty there
may issue a coachman and horses.
