February 24, 1958
For several days the idea of suicide keeps coming back to me. I think of it often, it is true; but thinking of it is one thing, submitting to its domination is another. Terrible bout of black obsessions! By my own means, it is impossible to remain thus for long. I have exhausted my capacity to console myself.
Corsica, Andalusia, Provence, — this planet will thus not have been useless.
My lack of talent borders on genius…
To conceive more projects than a swindler or an explorer does, and nevertheless to be struck by abulia, reaches down — without metaphor — to the root of the will.
Sick brain, sick stomach, — and all that comes with it. The essential is compromised.
Vision of collapse. That’s what I saw from morning to evening. I have all of the infirmities of a prophet, but none of the gifts.
And nevertheless I know — with an impetuous and irresistible knowledge — that I possess if not visions, in any case glimmers of the future. And such a future, great gods!
I feel contemporaneous with all future terrors.
My great predilection for shipwrecks.
I have all the qualities of an epileptic, except epilepsy.
Bout of superhuman, inhuman violence! I sometimes have the impression that all my flesh, everything material that I am will be resolved one sudden day into a cry whose significance will escape everyone, except God…
False prophet: even my deceptions are shipwrecked.
The only thing that suits me is the end of the world… Need for terror or infinite spinelessness?
I have renounced, among other things, poetry…
Whatever my recriminations, my violence, my bitterness may be, they all come from a discontentment with myself that no one here below could equal. Horror of self, horror of the world.
What cannot be rendered in terms of religion does not deserve to be experienced.
“The idea once came to me that if one wanted to destroy, to crush, to punish a man in such an implacable manner that the worst crook would tremble from it beforehand in fear, it was enough to give to his work a character of perfect absurdity, of absolute uselessness.” (Memoirs from the House of the Dead)
Nearly everything I do to earn my keep has this mark of uselessness, for everything that absolutely disinterests me appears to me as gratuitousness that borders on torture.
Sometimes I feel infinite forces in the depths of me. Alas! I don’t know how to use them; I believe in nothing, and to act, one must believe, believe, believe… I waste every day, since I let the world that I inhabit die. With an arrogance of folly, to sink yet in indignity, in a sterile sorrow, in impotence and silence.
Russia is a “vacant nation”, said Dostoyevsky. It was, but is no longer, alas!
“The sorrow in accordance with God produces salutary repentance that one never regrets, whereas the sorrow of the world produces death.” (Saint Paul)
“Who seek it [death] more ardently than treasure…” (Job)
There is a certain voluptuousness in resisting the appeal of suicide.
Russia! I have a deep attraction for this country that has destroyed mine.
Mercy, — just this word contains worlds. How far religion goes! I misjudge myself, voluntarily repudiate Christ, and such is the perversion of my nature, that I cannot repent of it.
A minimum of interest in things is needed in order to write; one must continue to believe that they can be captured, or at least touched by words, — I no longer have either this interest or this belief…
His rudimentary smile.
Torn between cynicism and elegy.
If I could write a psalm every day, how my fate would be relieved by it. What have I to write! if at least I could read one of them and nothing more! — I am short of my salvation or rather: I conceive the means to save myself, but I do not have these means, I cannot have them…
The two greatest sages of Antiquity end up: Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, a slave and an emperor.