Saturday, June 21, 1958
My father has been dead for exactly six months.
Boredom captures me again, the same boredom that I knew on certain Saturdays in my childhood, and the one that then devastated my adolescence. An emptiness that drains space, against which only alcohol could defend me. But alcohol is forbidden to me, all remedies are forbidden to me. And to think that I am thereby abstinent! But in what do I persevere? Without doubt, in Being.
My pusillanimity prevents me from being myself. I would have had the courage neither to live nor to destroy myself. Always halfway between quasi-existence and nothingness.
“A single day of solitude makes me taste more pleasures than all my triumphs have ever given me.” (Charles V)
At twenty, I had an insatiable desire for glory; — I no longer have it now. And without it, how could I act? It remains for me nothing more than the consolation of an intimate and ineffective thought.
For months, I lived all my moments of anguish in the company of Emily Dickinson.