12/11/42

Sometimes I have the strange belief that there is a remedy for every sensation of discomfort, physical or mental. When I drink water after long thirst, eat food after hungering, or once every five years take bicarbonate of soda for a digestive ailment (nervous indigestion) and when the pain passes in two or three minutes, the dull ache inside of me lifting and disappearing, keep on at my books with the fathomless ingratitude of a young person who has always been healthy, when such things occur then I think one may always make arrangements to stay comfortable all one’s life. And yet this is the very opposite of what I have always believed (since I began believing anything, around the age of fourteen) and what is in my blood to believe. I believe in constant discomfort, varied equally like the ups and downs of a business chart about its line of normalcy, as the natural state of mankind. Therefore these happy, blind, animallike “insights” disturb me.