--My old friends are, I am afraid, disappointed in
me; they think that I do nothing, that I have deceived their
expectations and their hopes. I, too, am disappointed. All that would
restore my self-respect and give me a right to be proud of myself, seems
to me unattainable and impossible, and I fall back upon trivialities,
gay talk, distractions. I am always equally lacking in hope, in faith,
in resolution. The only difference is that my weakness takes sometimes
the form of despairing melancholy and sometimes that of a cheerful
quietism. And yet I read, I talk, I teach, I write, but to no effect; it
is as though I were walking in my sleep. The Buddhist tendency in me
blunts the faculty of free self-government and weakens the power of
action; self-distrust kills all desire, and reduces me again and again
to a fundamental skepticism. I care for nothing but the serious and the
real, and I can take neither myself nor my circumstances seriously. I
hold my own personality, my own aptitudes, my own aspirations, too
cheap. I am forever making light of myself in the name of all that is
beautiful and admirable. In a word, I bear within me a perpetual
self-detractor, and this is what takes all spring out of my life. I have
been passing the evening with Charles Heim, who, in his sincerity, has
never paid me any literary compliment.
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