March 30, 1959
Handel’s Messiah. — There must be a paradise, or at least that it had existed — otherwise what reason for so much of the sublime?
Bells of Bruges, remembering you stirs vestiges of heaven in me, you make me go back before my fall.
Since the age of seventeen, I have been affected by a secret pain, undetectable, but which has ruined by thoughts and my illusions: a tingling in the nerves, night and day, et which does not permit me, except when sleeping, a single moment of forgetting. Feeling of subjection to an eternal treatment or eternal torture.
I have read too much… Reading has devoured my thought. When I read, I have the impression of “doing” something, of justifying myself before “society”, of having a job, of escaping the shame of being an idle ——-, a useless and unusable man.
One forgets all pains, but one does not forget a single humiliation.