--Distaste--discouragement. My heart is growing cold. And
yet what affectionate care, what tenderness, surrounds me!... But
without health, what can one do with all the rest? What is the good of
it all to me? What was the good of Job's trials? They ripened his
patience; they exercised his submission.
Come, let me forget myself, let me shake off this melancholy, this
weariness. Let me think, not of all that is lost, but of all that I
might still lose. I will reckon up my privileges; I will try to be
worthy of my blessings.
March 21, 1881.--This invalid life is too Epicurean. For five or six
weeks now I have done nothing else but wait, nurse myself, and amuse
myself, and how weary one gets of it! What I want is work. It is work
which gives flavor to life. Mere existence without object and without
effort is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor, and languor to
disgust. Besides, here is the spring again, the season of vague desires,
of dull discomforts, of dim aspirations, of sighs without a cause. We
dream wide-awake. We search darkly for we know not what; invoking the
while something which has no name, unless it be happiness or death.
March 28, 1881.--I cannot work; I find it difficult to exist. One may be
glad to let one's friends spoil one for a few months; it is an
experience which is good for us all; but afterward? How much better to
make room for the living, the active, the productive.
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