I like people too much or not at all.
There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice – patched, retreaded and approved for the road.
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.
I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.
Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.
So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.
Intoxicated with madness, I’m in love with my sadness.
I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.
Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.
God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?
To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.
Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death – mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.
What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.
No, I won’t try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter ‘Did you have a nice vacation?’ ‘Oh, yes, and you?’ I’ll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.
But writing poems and letters doesn’t seem to do much good.
Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.
How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?
I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.
A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.
I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.