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12/18/60
The muse doesn’t come when you beckon. She comes when you’ve tried all day to get something right, and you’re tired and about to go to bed—and then you stay up. She comes when you’ve lost your love. She touches you, she touches your shoulder, and then you know you’re not alone after all.
12/18/63
The taste of death is sometimes in my mouth, these solitary evenings.
Each day I live means one day less to live.
That’s evident!
Before I die, I’d spend some time with her,
Just living.
Mornings are frantic, like all mornings,
The too fresh mind incapable
Of the maniacal decisions that produce art.
Exhausted by afternoon, I have completed my chores,
And am faced with myself and my hot-self again.
Then I work. I work like a worm in the earth,
I work like a termite fashioning a tunnel, a bridge.
I work for a future I can no longer see.
That’s my life.
Will I in five years, two years, one,
Gnash my teeth again (teeth long ago gnashed to bits)
And curse what I hesitate to call my fate, my pattern?
Or should I call it my stupidity?
Who but an imbecile would have chosen such a hard way?
Or shall I in five years or one,
Grow like an oak dressed in evergreen.
Happiness having swollen in me, become me,
Because of the devotion which she swears?
This I argue with myself on paper.
That is what I feel like sometimes,
Paper.
8/9/65
With the new acquaintance: that moment in the conversation when I realize he has a different morality, weltanschauung from mine, like a sudden canyon between us. We can change direction and find some bridge across somewhere else. But the knowledge lurks. It will turn up again years from now to part us, in every way, though we remain friends.
11/3/66
In the most terrible and terrifying moments of my life (ten, perhaps, in a lifetime) Mozart, not a sedative, is the hope—though not the healing power. There is no healing power. But Mozart knew all that. I, or we, suffer here and now, and he often wrote his music during the worst. It is this that I admire, and only this spirit that gives me courage to go on also. It is (apparently!) impossible for me to convey the joy I felt one miserable Saturday morning, listening to the 24th piano concerto on a transistor radio in the bathroom. I had been wretched a moment before. But with Mozart’s courage, I could face lions. Bach for minor crises. Mozart for major ones.
1/5/70
These are “man of the house” problems, for I do think if it concerned a married couple, the husband would worry more than the wife, as he would be expected to deal with them. No wonder men die a bit earlier than their wives. It’s 3:30 AM. I lie in bed reading in this first hideous month without my cat, wishing I could find some consolation somewhere. It is to be found neither in friends nor in success in work, I think, because I have both, and declined an invitation to dinner for tomorrow. I keep trying to grasp within myself (actually by working) the solace and security I need. To look outside—just to have the company of other people—seems escape—though I write an absurd amount of letters. Obviously I am self-absorbed. But what writer isn’t? My besetting sin—lately—is that I reproach myself too much. I am constantly telling myself I don’t accomplish enough, I don’t work fast enough, I could do better. (This perhaps is not even the opinion of people who know me.) Alas, it is so difficult for me to know when to flog myself, when to say “Thank God (or luck) that I have done as well as I have”—or am doing as well. What is this terrible drive? It makes me miserable. The only consolation (one must find one) is that there are other tormented ones who scribble such things in the early hours of the morning.
9/12/71
What troubles the small and the great is the difficulty of reconciling their personal dramas with such things as the moon in its course, the strength of the sea, the inevitability of death. Everyone feels so small, yet his problems shake him with the force of hurricanes. It does not make sense.
1/31/77
If one’s entire life is work, preparation, diligence, eternally aiming toward something as a student aims toward a diploma, it is bewildering to reach the goal—or even 90% of it. What does one do then? And why? Was the objective money? No. Leisure? No. Fame? Again no. Just an abstract excellence really. One can have the same feeling at seventeen or nineteen, having written a short-story word perfect, or nearly so.
Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to "soften" the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether of individuals or entire peoples—need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.
Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend—conditioned by the myths of the old order—to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.
The "fear of freedom" which afflicts the oppressed, a fear which may equally well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the pre servers consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the op pressor.
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human com pletion.
[...] In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action. [...]