March 27, 1835

I know well that with resolution and effort I would succeed in training my mind in austere logic, in a certain regular handling of my faculties, in the sustained cultivation of useful truths. But I have received so little power of deduction, so little method and logical circumspection, that it would never be more than weak and sickly work.

Calm in one’s thoughts marks strength of mind. Yet all my attempts are only disconnected, convulsive creations, breaking off abruptly at every minute like a madman’s discourse. I escape myself; a fatal disturbance throws my head into turmoil; the liveliness of certain ideas intoxicates it; it wanders through I know not what imaginings. But what use is complaint? If I were a plowman, perhaps I would blame the weakness of my arms and the swift exhaustion of my breath. I have never in my life turned a clod, and I am tranquil on that side. If, limiting the work of my mind to what my condition requires, I had not put its strength fully to the test, I would be tranquil on that side too. But it is done; to console oneself for it is the shortest course. Why not also go back up the current of habit and thus return to the original calm? Let me close forever the opening foolishly made for the secret waters contained in my soul! Let them sleep there! Those waters are a few drops; doubtless I shall not have to fear their storms.

If I still have a few steps to take here below, I would like them to be calm. I do not know where I come from or where I am going. At least one must walk quietly in the peace of an ignorance which will soon be enlightened. True wisdom is patience for one who will not last.

There is more strength and beauty in the well-kept secret of oneself and one’s thoughts than in the unfolding of an entire sky one might have within. So did Marie: the riches and sweetness of her soul revealed themselves only through the charm of her speech and the peaceful enchantment her existence spread all around her. What I am doing here is not discouragement. Though I am still subject to certain returns of that old infirmity, I have reduced it enough for it no longer to hinder the practical course of my life. The nature of my mind, avid and restless, and in no way gifted for the strong and severe operations of reasoning, forbids me any hope of satisfactory progress in the philosophy of this world. Now, that order of inquiry removed, I see nothing worth an effort of thought. Consequently, when I have acquired enough ordinary learning to distribute to little boys throughout my life, I must be content. I shall possess my share of knowledge. It is a very confined and small ambition. But for a man like me, who has not enough energy in his heart to produce a mere will-o’-the-wisp of passion, and in his mind has just enough to be fruitlessly tormented, is not little best? The little needed to manage one’s material life, and for the rest to set about passing through men and things slowly, peacefully, conscious of a profound ignorance of the impenetrability of the destiny which drives us, with a little reverie, if one wishes.

April 3, 1835

The moral expanse my life embraces is like a solitude covered by a pale, motionless sky without seasons. The temperature there is lively enough to have stirred a certain fermentation in the soil’s fertility; but since it eternally keeps the same degree, the inward sap, raised and warmed to the corresponding point, can rise no further, and finds itself condemned to ferment evenly, restlessly, fruitlessly, like water which trembles without interruption, without raising or lowering its murmur, in the constant warmth of a small fire. From this comes a continuous, subtle, obstinate suffering for me. Avid, restless, catching glimpses, my mind is afflicted by all the ills which a never-completed puberty would surely engender. I grow old and exhaust myself in such mediocre transports of mind, such frail passions of intelligence; everything which moves within me advances so little, and what cannot move sees so far, that it would be a hundred times better to have received a blind and paralytic mind. The unease, at first fairly confined, has spread rapidly. Like a disease spreading in the blood, it appears everywhere today, in the strangest developments. My head dries up. Like a tree dying at its crown, I feel, when the wind blows, that it passes through many withered branches at my summit. Work is unbearable to me, or rather impossible. Application does not engender sleep in me, but a sharp and nervous disgust which carries me I know not where, into streets and public squares. Spring, whose kindnesses used to come every year to charm me in my retreats, cautiously and secretly, crushes me this year beneath a mass of sudden heat. Life does not descend from heaven in the coolness of nights, nor distributed in the drops of showers, nor melted and dissolved throughout the air’s whole expanse; it falls from above like a weight.

I wish some event would take me out of my present position. If I were free, I would embark for some country where I would have to form new habits.

April 8, 1835

My head is dry. I suffer there a pain half moral, half physical. On certain days I feel something like a ball of nerves forming there through dull, tyrannical contractions. Excessive cold or heat, boredom, certain movements of the head, inward irritations contribute to this. Then I imagine nothing. A strange stupor seizes me; I remain motionless, feeling nothing but the heavy, overwhelming fixity of life, which seems to stop in a state of incomprehensible unease, and the beating of an artery stirring in that part of my head.

April 30, 1835

When suffering has withdrawn and life remains pale, weakened, but confident, tasting a calm delight in the last sensations of the affliction as they fade, the most reserved soul inclines toward prolonged, slightly uncertain discourses, mingled with painful memories and a thousand smiling plans. The first glimmers of well-being returning to existence enter laden with languishing dreams and gentle, confused images, like so many atoms swimming within them. This state is dearer to the soul than health. At such moments, from different sides of my being, as from a tranquil countryside beneath a grayish sky with no movement of clouds, moderate sounds rise, signs of a life returning from afar. These sounds are produced by my thoughts which, emerging from their painful numbness, make a slight stirring of timid joy and begin conversations full of memories or hopes. At other times, when they are slower to awaken, I hear within myself during these calm hours only light and infrequent rustlings, as in a wood where birds sleep upon the high branches. Today, freed from their heaviness, they speak steadily and tranquilly of the sorrows endured. They await life, the future, the arrival of existence’s successive mysteries, strengthening one another through the eloquence of inward exhortations, or falling silent at intervals to listen to the bubbling of the secret torrent of philosophy which flows beneath some lives, like those torrents which ran through cloisters.

Most of the faculties which constitute the mind’s power are lacking in me, or are only indicated there, as the branches which should have grown are indicated on trees by dead or sterile buds. To arrange, compare, deduce are for me operations so considerable, consuming the powers of my mind so quickly, that if every strong action of the mind is not forbidden me, the power left to me is very nearly useless. When I want to suspend one truth from another truth, I am like a man who, with his half-paralyzed arm, strives to fasten two objects together: that arm rises with great difficulty, hesitates, shivers, and always misses its mark. Many causes in my inward and outward nature bent me early toward myself. My soul was my first horizon. For a long time now I have contemplated there. I watch vapors rise from the depths of my being as from a deep valley, taking form only beneath the breath of chance; indescribable phantoms which ascend slowly and without interruption. The powerful fascination exerted upon the soul, as upon the senses, by the monotonous, continuous passage of any wandering thing possesses me and does not let my eyes turn from the spectacle for a moment.

I earn my living with the little Latin that school put into my head and which, somehow, has not perished there. The length of my journeys, the diversity of my tasks take the best part of my days. I suffer great losses in material concerns; my river is lost in the sands. I have almost no reserves amid this immense encroachment of daily subsistence upon the time of thought, and I foresee that throughout my life I shall always have to throw some of this divine prey to cruel necessity. I tell myself that the moment will come when we shall begin to think eternally in an assured calm; but until then, to toil, to consume oneself in cares for the benefit of a future corpse, to take much from the spirit in order to pay for a place among men, alas, whom I treat very gently if I call them strangers to me, men of a certain unbearable activity and a desolating level: all this is a very great agony of the soul, strangely overturning the meaning of that word life.

May 7, 1835

Today you suffer from the poetry without outlet which fills your being. That pain is terrible, but so beautiful! Take consolation in the noble and rare nature of your torments: so many men suffer as much as you for wretched things! You have a privilege in sorrow; what more do you want here below?

What every man of a certain nature, set apart rather than superior, guards most vigilantly is the secret of his soul and the intimate habits of his thoughts. I love that god Harpocrates, his forefinger upon his mouth.

May 14, 1835

Who can say he is in a refuge unless he stands upon some height, the utmost height he could climb? For some time I have been looking toward those temples of serene wisdom which ancient philosophy raised upon very lofty summits and which few ascended. If only I could storm those heights! When shall I be in calm? Once the gods, wishing to reward the virtue of certain mortals, caused a vegetable nature to rise around them, absorbing in its embrace, as it rose, their aged bodies, and replacing their life, wholly worn by extreme age, with the strong and mute life which reigns beneath the bark of oaks. Those mortals, made motionless, stirred only in the tips of their branches moved by the winds. Is this not the sage and his calm? Does he not slowly clothe himself in this metamorphosis of the few men loved by the gods? To sustain oneself with a sap chosen by oneself from the elements, to enfold oneself, to appear to men powerful in one’s roots and gravely indifferent like certain great trunks admired in the forests, to give forth at random only vague but profound sounds, like those of certain leafy crowns which imitate the murmurs of the sea: that is a state of life which seems to me worthy of effort, and well suited to be set against men and the fortune of the day.