I think I may well be a Jew.
I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.
I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn’t night and it wasn’t day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.
But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.
I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.
There was a beautiful time...
What I didn’t say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.
I said: I must remember this, being small.
I like people, but to learn about one individual always appeals to me more than anything.
Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.
Every day one has to earn the name of ‘writer’ over again, with much wrestling.
It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.
I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.
It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.
Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it.