And in this house it was tacitly required that I act like a boy. The reluctant masquerade had begun. At about this time I was beginning to understand vaguely the mechanism of the fact that what people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature, and that it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade.
I was like a person who has been suffering an unknown disease in an agony of fear: just learning the name of his disease, even though it is an incurable one, gives him a surprising feeling of temporary relief. He knows well, though, that the relief is only temporary. Moreover in his heart he foresees a still more inescapable hopelessness, which, by its very nature, will give a more permanent feeling of relief.
I was mistaking the fierce, impossible desire of not wanting to be myself for the sexual desire of a man of the world, for the desire that arises from his being himself.
I had a presentiment then that there is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain. Looking up at that dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking, ‘I want to change into him’, thinking, ‘I want to be him’.
Someone once said that homosexuals have on their faces a certain loneliness that will not come off.
A woman is never so drunk with happiness as when she discovers desire in the eyes of a man.
Non mi curavo di nulla, e d’altronde nulla si curava di me.
Soggiacevo a quello struggimento, ormai ben attecchito in me, di voler nutrire realmente i sentimenti che mi venivano attribuiti.
Man does not live simply in order to die.
Ordinary bourgeois life held no force sufficiently compelling to drag one out into the chill drizzle without so much as an umbrella.
Daydreaming is not an intellectual process but rather an escape from intellectualism.
Ever since then violent anticipation has always been an anguish rather than joy for me.
Ordinary life is even more horrible than war.
Ever since those days this has been the attitude with which I have always confronted life: from things too much waited for, too much embellished with anticipatory daydreams, there is in the end nothing I can do but run away.
The soul, you see, is a shy and retiring thing. It lurks in dark places and dislikes sunlight. And so, if you do not keep the skylight open at all times, the soul will rot. It easily decays, like a fresh sea urchin.
I somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation. As i have remarked several times, the future was a heavy burden for me. From the very beginning, life has oppressed me with a heavy sense of duty. Even though i was clearly incapable of performing this duty, life still nagged at me for my dereliction. Thus I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders.
For ideas are, in the long run, essentially foreign to human existence; and the body – receptacle of the involuntary muscles, of the internal organs and circulatory system over which it has no control – is foreign to the spirit, so that it is even possible for people to use the body as a metaphor for ideas, both being something quite alien to human existence as such.
But then another thought occurred to me: if we grant that human passion has the power to rise above all absurdity, how can it be argued that it does not have the power to rise above the absurdities of passion itself?
Those who believe, believe everything, while those who doubt don’t believe a thing.
Well, that’s what they do on television. Every fifteen minutes, there are breaks for commercials. That way we get to look forward to what’s coming next. That’s how it works in real life too.