All or nothing! This is my
inborn disposition, my primitive stuff, my "old man." And yet if some
one will but give me a little love, will but penetrate a little into my
inner feeling, I am happy and ask for scarcely anything else. A child's
caresses, a friend's talk, are enough to make me gay and expansive. So
then I aspire to the infinite, and yet a very little contents me;
everything disturbs me and the least thing calms me. I have often
surprised in my self the wish for death, and yet my ambitions for
happiness scarcely go beyond those of the bird: wings! sun! a nest! I
persist in solitude because of a taste for it, so people think. No, it
is from distaste, disgust, from shame at my own need of others, shame at
confessing it, a fear of passing into bondage if I do confess it.
September 2, 1863.--How shall I find a name for that subtle feeling
which seized hold upon me this morning in the twilight of waking? It was
a reminiscence, charming indeed, but nameless, vague, and featureless,
like the figure of a woman seen for an instant by a sick man in the
uncertainty of delirium, and across the shadows of his darkened room. I
had a distinct sense of a form which I had seen somewhere, and which had
moved and charmed me once, and then had fallen back with time into the
catacombs of oblivion.
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