362
PARTISAN REVIEW
breaks down every obstacle, and clears the way. But then again only
insanity will receive me, because I did not want the ascent, which is
achieved only if wanted.
February 4.
In the desperate cold, the changed face, the incom–
prehensible others.
What M. said without being entirely able to understand the truth
of it (there is also a justifiable sad pride), about the happiness of chatting
with people. How can anybody but I enjoy chatting! Probably too late;
by a peculiar detour return to people.
February 5.
Escaped from them. By one or another adroit jump.
At home, by the lamp, in the quiet room. Imprudent to say it. It calls
them from the forests, as though I had lighted the lamp to help them
pick up the trail.
February 6.
Comforted upon hearing about a man who worked
in Paris, Brussels, London, and on a Brazilian steamship that sailed up
the Amazon River to the borders of Peru, and who in the war bore
with relative ease the terrible suffering of the campaign in Transylvania,
because he had been used to hardships since childhood. The comfort
lies not only in the demonstration of such possibilities, but in the pleasure
over the fact that with such achievements on the first plane much must
have been won also on the second plane, much wrested from clenched
fists. It is therefore possible.
February 12.
The rejection that I always encountered was not in
terms of "I do not love you," but of: "You cannot love me, however
much you want to, you unhappily love your love for me, your love for
me does not love you." Hence it is incorrect to say that I have experienced
the words: "I love you," I have experienced only the expectant silence
that should have been broken by my "I love you," I have experienced
only this, nothing else.
My fear when tobogganing, my apprehensiveness when walking
on smooth snow, a little story that I read today, bring up again the
long-ignored, always close-lying thought, whether it was after all only
insane self-interest, fear for myself, and not the fear for a higher self,
but fear for my ordinary well-being, that was the cause of my decline–
and actually in such a way that I supplied the avenger from my own
being (a special case of the right hand not knowing what the left does).
In my chancellory the reckoning is as though my life were to begin
only tomorrow, whereas I am at the end.
