June 9, 1958
The universe explodes in my brain. Intolerable fever! I am a finger’s breadth away from Chaos. The elements are unleashed. I lose ground. Who will reconcile me with what this may be? A fixed point, I seek a fixed point, and find only incertitude and mud, and an uncontrollable delirium. Being is a crossed-out text, and I no longer have the strength to rewrite it.
Everything is appearance — but appearance of what? Of Nothing.
I have a bit of skepticism in me that nothing can grasp, and that resists the assault of all my beliefs, of all my metaphysical impulses.
This fever in a pure and sterile state, and this frozen cry!
Having an obsessive sentiment of one’s nothingness is not being humble, not by a long shot. A little humility, I need a little humility more than anyone. But the sensation of my nothingness inflates my pride.
The sensation of an insect fastened to an invisible cross, a drama both cosmic and infinitesimal, a heaviness from a ferocious and elusive hand on me.
I should fashion myself a smile, to arm myself with it, to put myself under its protection, to interpose it between myself and the world, to disguise my wounds, in short to become an apprentice of the mask.
A life of failure, of harlotry, of useless sorrows and impotence, of objectless and directionless nostalgia; a nothingness which crawls on the roads, and which wallows in its pains and its sniggers.
Ah! if I could convert myself to my essence! but what if it were corrupted? Decidedly, I invalidate myself and invalidate myself completely. There is no longer any trace of myself in me.
When others have ceased to exist for us, we cease to exist for ourselves in our turn.