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AUGUST 26, 1941
[...] I want to do so much. The one moment of discouragement and doubt comes before all one’s things are put away again, when one sees all the old books and thinks that one has read them all and how little one knows anyway, when one sees unfinished manuscripts and thinks of the labors ahead. I am aiming higher than ever before. God or something give me courage, and power!
1/22/42
Able to think only when I have a background, of music, of voices, of lecturing, able to think creatively only in the unconcious, losing the thread when I realize I am following a thread, much addicted to cigarettes and alcohol; shy about emotions of any kind and disturbed at their display; caricaturing my own talents as they lie now, writing facetious (and rather good) doggerel, sketches and perhaps whole books, specializing in takeoffs and pure whimsy and fantasy; highly critical of people, but with a circle of friends as wide as the Tropic of Cancer; subsisting mainly on fruit of citrus nature: rarely going in a church door except to hear Bach or Händel; fond of 18th century literature and music; dabbling in water color and stabbing at sculpture; aiming high and believing myself capable of great things. Falling in love more and more easily and “irrevocably.” Happier still when most alone.
FEBRUARY 6, 1942
Dinner with Hauser, we cooked, haphazardly, and started from scratch. Plenty of liquor. But no magic—no thrill, no beauty—no imagination, no ecstatic present, now perfect in the lift of a glass or a cigarette as I felt with Rosalind! I merely sit there, thinking of what to say next, stuffing my face and pondering on the personal spiel of certain people. He is all very well. I understand him and really like him—but he is as common to me as my bathmat.
2/11/42
Mozart concertos! Aged sixteen in my room at One Bank Street, with the door closed. The piano sings alone, and I lay down my books and close my eyes. One phrase in the slow second movement, with gentle fingertips, touches me like a kiss—I had not noticed the double notes, the dancing phrase in thirds, and it is a revelation—just as a kiss is a revelation from one we have known before, but whose kiss is the new unknown. At sixteen, I lay and asked myself could there be anything ever in the world so wonderfully beautiful, so perfect, as this Mozart concerto? And the answer was, no, not really—only someone might somehow be a concerto.
5/18/42
Creation of the best order comes from the greatest need. Who never has sat on the edge of his bed weeping through the night, conscious of the tongueless voice within him, thirsting after the beautiful tone, the exquisite line of verse, the perfect stroke, the flavor in his mouth that would tell him perfection, does not know what I suffer now, and will never create. Let me be, says my own voice. Let this first painful child deliver itself. Then come, if you will, probe and test and kill me, but I shall never die then. In the air-pockets, in the mountain tops, in the clothes of all mankind, in the rock of the earth and the cement of the pavements, in the waters of the seas I shall be then! But I that am heavy laden now, leave me be. I shall fashion my own tongue out of the dross of the fire, I shall find it buried in the twisted ashes. It will be there for me, it will be like no one else’s. Then I shall speak not greatness, not life, not growth perhaps, not family nor brotherly love, but speak the need of others like me who have not found their tongues, or for whom perhaps there will never be a tongue but mine. The duty is great and the burden is heavy on me, but the work will be the deepest joy on earth. Not life shall I create, not life, but truth above all, as no one has seen it before.
6/3/42
I am too familiar to myself—too old—and rather boring. The avenues of varied goals are closing up. And wherever, even, I commence the long pull anew, I shall have with me the same teeth with the same fillings, the same aches on rainy days, the same wrinkles in my forehead. Is this some chance unfortunate combination of elements in me? In my body? In my brain? This scar upon my finger, this birthmark on my arm—should they have been elsewhere, perhaps half an inch? How would another carry them, and how notice them or how forget them? I feel my grave about my shoulders, the light grows dim never to rise again, my breath is feeble and disinterested. Oh, but I shall live so much longer! And there will be moments, whole weeks, whole years when there will be no grave and no mold-smell. But intervals there will be, too, when I, regaining energy meted by the dry crabbed hand of sleep, of food, of intercourse, will see as though my eyes turned inward to reality, the hollow-orbed face of death, the flaking skin like medieval painted saints, and know then that life is one long business of dying.
6/29/42
The sensation of failing always, leads to this in the still active person: a desire to be “someone else,” the feeling that even with a new and propitious idea, the executor is the same, the executor and artist is “I,” bringing inevitably the old train of faults the old plan of stumble-blocks, makes one want a new inside, a whole new inside.
SEPTEMBER 10, 1942
[...] I am old enough to want to live my own life. I have done experimenting, wasting precious time that is ever running shorter. I should gladly give up—ridiculous phrase—my drinking, dinner going, cocktails, absurdities!
9/27/42
Sometimes I feel so much wiser than my body: then I begin to feel wiser than my head, and finally wonder what it is that feels wiser, that is wiser, which brings me once more to the insolvable problem of what am I? I do not believe in happiness or the so-called normalcy as the ideal of human life. People who are “ideally happy” are ideally stupid. Consequently I do not believe in the remedial work of modern psychiatrists. The greatest contribution they could make to the world and to all its posterity would be to leave abnormal people alone to follow their own noses, stars, lodestones, divining rods, phantasies or what have you.
The world is filled with the peas that have rolled down the center of the board into the most full partition. Psychiatrists spend their time trying to push the odd peas over the barrier into the already crowded mean, in order to make mere regular peas to which they sincerely intend to point with pride. I believe that people should be allowed to go the whole hog with their perversions, abnormalities, unhappinesses and construction or destruction. Mad people are the only active people. They have built the world. Mad people, constructive geniuses, should have only enough normal intelligence to enable them to escape the forces that would normalize them.
OCTOBER 13, 1942
Never before have I been so enraptured with my life! It’s quite an impersonal sensation. It comes when I am alone or with someone, when I am reading a splendid book, looking at an imaginative image, or listening to good music. It came today, with fantastic and sustained force, when I was listening to “Sheep May Safely Graze” by J. S. Bach in a music shop during my lunch hour. It came on even more strongly when I read a page in Mysticism by [Evelyn] Underhill. It’s my faith—it’s my life. There is nothing but art.
Another ordinary day at the office. Miss Weick was moved to the other office. I’m with Goldberg, around whom I can’t smoke as much as I’d like. I am filled with inexpressible happiness. Yet it is sadness too. It is much greater than I. I do not concern myself with my own person: only with my aspirations, my desires, my work. I concern myself with the things I love.FF