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10/7/43
How delicate is the scale in which an artist weighs his worth. It must be delicate. There must be no overconfidence in the sustaining of his creative period: there must be confidence only in his honesty, and in nothing else. The reprimand of some slight fault, the polishing of a piece of work, in an evening, instead of the satisfying act of creation, is easily enough to destroy all that gives him joy, courage, pleasure and reward. A wastebasket out of place can do it. A cut in the finger can do it. And only the making of new life can reconstruct the shambles.
10/16/43
Every artist possesses a core—and this core remains forever untouched. Untouched by the lover and the beloved. However much you may love a woman, she can never enter.
4/2/44
I am lonely in the evenings, when the dusk invades my room, so politely, so subtly inviting me to do the things one cannot do alone. Sometimes the desire is in my arms only, and they are hungry like the stomach is hungry, for the solid embrace. Sometimes the desire is in my lips only and I bite it out of them. Sometimes the desire is a ghostly counter part of me, and stands beside me sadly. In the nights I lie and watch the moon on [its] hopeless quest, and learn anew the inexorable equation, my loneliness of one is the loneliness of one plus one and one times one and two.
4/29/44
Art is a stone-faced mountain that we attack again and again, always to be thrown back. We sit long minutes on a rock and look at the mountain with chin in hand, rally ourselves, and attack once more. We break first our noses, then our heads and then our hearts, but our way is in this direction and we cannot turn back. Finally we lie below, prostrate on the ground, and the mountain gives no shade for the flesh or the bones in the hot sun of exposure. And if we are worthy at the last, posterity points to the dents.
6/18/44
Note here: Happy days lead to stagnation of the mind. Happy days even in my opinion, reading, writing, drawing. Nothing has come in the way of ideas in the last two happy days. I used to think such days produced ideas. Now I wonder if frequent disturbance isn’t necessary.
11/14/44
Shall I say I can work when I am most unhappy? Perhaps this is the only way I can dupe myself, the only way that will let me produce any work. Anything, you know, to get one’s mind off oneself.
11/24/44
Perils of a first novel: Every character is one’s self, resulting in an oversoft or overhard treatment, neither of which results in the objective, which is essentially what has made good so much of the writing one has done before.
1/8/45
To live one’s life in the best way possible, one must live and move always with a sense of unreality, of drama in the smallest things, as though one lived a poem or a novel, attaching the greatest importance to the route one takes to a favorite restaurant, believing oneself while browsing in a bookshop, capable of being unmade or made, destroyed or reborn, by the choice of literature one makes. In one’s room alone, one should be Dante, Robinson Crusoe, Luther, Jesus Christ, Baudelaire, and in short should be a poet at all times, regarding oneself objectively and the outer world subjectively, compared to which state of mind the reality of the sorrow of a lost love is destructively real and brutal.
1/16/45
[...] I have a candle on my coffee table, candles are so beautiful at midday, with the snow’s gray glare and the gloom of the room on the side away from the windows. Henry James sits on a shelf, inviting me to forget my brief and unimportant day and stay with him in a slow moving, rarified world which I know will leave me clean, belonging finally to no time and no place. The radio plays bassoon sonatas. The potential pleasure of this morning, this day, which I feel only in anticipation, is more intoxicating than any substance or any physical sight. Merely to exist is an ecstatic pleasure. How inadequate are all these words, when the physical sensation now makes me taut, wanting to shout, laugh, leap around my room, and at the same time be quiet and learn and feel all I can!
5/17/45
The beautiful wonderful sensations of working again, after chaotic idleness that is anything but restful. To hell with the ship-getting-its-keel-back theory! This is literally being on top of the world. By dealing with three characters in a story, one somehow gets atop the entire world, understands all humanity (not in a moment, but in time) and above, beneath, through all, one has regained a momentum like that of the whirling earth and all the solar system, one has acquired a heartbeat.