September 19, 1834

O truth! Do you not sometimes appear to me like a luminous phantom behind a cloud? But the first wind disperses you. Could you be only an illusion of the soul’s eyes? — Reason and faith! When these two words become one, the world’s enigma will be solved. Meanwhile, what is to be done? At the hour when I write, the sky is magnificent, nature breathes breezes fresh and full of life, the world rolls melodiously, and amid all these harmonies something sad and alarmed circulates: the spirit of man, troubled by all this order which it does not understand.

September 21, 1834

After all, what is our concern here below? To spend life usefully. That established, what does it matter which instrument God places in a man’s hands to make use of time, pen or hammer? To accept without hesitation any condition for which the strength of my soul or my hands suffices: that is the resolution to which my soul clings, seeing everything flee and dissolve around it, the ground crumble beneath its feet. But can I count upon a resolution of my soul? Who will assure me of its constancy after a thousand changes, after a thousand plans taken up, abandoned, resumed? I escape myself; my heavy and indolent will grows breathless in pursuit of my soul, which takes the wings of the lightest dreams, the most fleeting illusions. Such is my life: it consists of serious plans forever changed, and vain dreams enduring, of long intoxications of the imagination and ridiculous scenes between my will and my soul, independent and swift in flight like a savage; and in the liveliest and innermost part of my life, always sharp suffering or a muffled unease, as the disorder increases or diminishes.

September 26, 1834

With a fairly resigned passivity, I accept the blow of launched hopes which fall back upon me. I begin to care rather little about the outward course of my life and the greater or lesser pleasantness I shall meet upon my path. When I have bread for my hunger and water for my thirst, I must, more than anyone, be content and hold my peace. Idle and entirely superfluous in society, I have a right, in the common distribution, only to the portion strictly necessary to sustain my life.

September 28, 1834

Everything grows confused within and without. An immense chaos, nature, men, learning, the totality of things rolls its waves against an isolated point like a reef in the sea, my soul lost in foam and noise... I withstand the assault of an infinite wave; how long shall I hold firm? If I sink into your breast, mysterious waves, shall I fare like those knights who, drawn to the bottom of lakes, found marvelous palaces there, or, like that fisherman of the fable, shall I become a god on falling into the sea?

I doubted myself, an imperceptible point. The doubt which covered that imperceptible point has broken its bounds; it covers the world; an atom has expanded over the entire universe. I suffered only within myself; I suffer in all things.

September 29, 1834

The germinating seed drives life in two opposite directions; the plumule grows upward and the radicle downward. I would like to be the insect which lodges and lives in the radicle. I would place myself at the very tip of the roots and contemplate the powerful action of the pores which draw in life; I would watch life pass from the breast of the fertile molecule into the pores which, like so many mouths, awaken it and attract it with melodious calls. I would witness the ineffable love with which it rushes toward the being that invokes it, and the being’s joy. I would be present at their embraces.

October 22, 1834

For three weeks, outward work which devours all my days down to the crumbs: a revolution in my habits, an abrupt transition from the indolence of dreams to the breathlessness of action. All this bustle of busy life absorbs a certain portion of my thought, but it is that floating portion which I let go to every wind like the trailing folds of a cloak. I have no regret for it. These are the waves which come upon the shore: the sand drinks of them, man skims them, the sea gives them up to whoever wants them. So my thought at its edges is taken by the cares and concerns of active life; but out at sea, nothing touches it, no one draws from it, nothing leaves its waves except through the continual evaporation of its water, drawn up by an unknown power.

November 23, 1834

Two months now of action, of participation in human toil. But in bending over my labor, in digging the furrow where I have just sown my first sweat, I have felt only physical weariness. My soul returns from its days with the freshness of waking. Not long ago it shuddered and fainted when the thought of an outward act to accomplish passed before it. If, at the moment when necessity drove me into the fray of those who act, flogging me like those Eastern soldiers driven into battle by blows of the whip, if, I say, at that moment my soul had been bent low enough to lie close to action, it would have fallen backward. Fortunately, a little before that time, it had begun a movement which carries it far from action’s battlefields. This departure was neither abrupt nor unforeseen; breaths which swelled it from time to time, like the first cool stirrings of a breeze, had foretold it. It left at the right moment; now it is out of danger. Joyful like those captives who row hard to escape a barbarous coast, it plunges with delight into its flight, withdraws toward places unknown to all and to itself, but it is sure of reaching them because they draw it, and an infallible presentiment of the wonders they reserve for it sustains it on the way.

December 10, 1834

Of what nature am I, then, that new states should always come upon me against which I can prepare nothing, that at every moment some other infirmity should reveal itself on a side where I had felt no concern? Today that poor imagination by which I usually live, from which flows everything that circulates within me of unknown joys and those hidden transports, none of which escapes to be lost outside, that poor imagination has dried up. It will soon be eight days since my inward life began to diminish, since the river fell, shrinking so perceptibly that after a few turns of the sun it was no more than a trickle of water. Today I saw its last drop pass.

I give the word imagination a broad meaning: for me it is the name of inward life, the collective designation of the soul’s most beautiful faculties, those which clothe ideas in the adornment of images as well as those which, turned toward the infinite, meditate perpetually upon the invisible and imagine it with images of unknown origin and ineffable form. This is hardly philosophical and departs strangely from the known psychologies; but in this respect I care little for men and the arrangements they have made of our faculties; I break their systems which hinder me and go, free, as far from them as possible, to rebuild a soul and a world according to my liking.

Certainly I cannot believe that our liveliest faculties die like a wavering torch, and that all the inward springs suddenly close as though struck by a curse. But it is undeniable that life is interrupted, that the river of secret joys suspends its course to let tribes of unknown bitterness and desolation pass. I suffer this terrible invasion. I listen within myself and hear no more of what charmed me. Subtle, mingled rustlings, undulating choirs of distant voices, echoes of nature’s inward songs: all that beautiful torrent of sounds has ceased. Like a man walking at night equipped with a torch, as I advanced, objects seemed to clothe themselves in a brilliance at once vivid and gentle, and beneath this light their softened, enlivened form seemed to delight as in its own fluid and to taste I know not what pleasures which animated its countenance and gave it beauties never seen before. Today I cast only shadow; every form is opaque and stricken with death. As in a night walk, I advance with the isolated sense of my existence among the inert phantoms of all things.

My inward life rather resembles that circle of Dante’s hell where a crowd of souls rushes after a swiftly borne standard. The multitude of my thoughts, an agile and tumultuous crowd without sound, like shades, rushes without rest toward a fatal sign, a shifting, luminous form, irresistibly attractive, which flees with the speed of uncreated appearances. A lying guide, doubtless, for its flight is too seductive not to draw my soul into some cruel trap; but whatever may happen, I yield to the lure. Like a child on a journey, my mind smiles continually at beautiful regions it sees within itself and will never see elsewhere. I dwell with the inward elements of things; I follow the stars’ rays and the rivers’ currents back to the heart of the mysteries of their generation. Nature admits me to the most secluded of her divine dwellings, to the starting point of universal life; there I catch sight of the cause of movement and hear the first song of beings in all its freshness. Who has not caught himself watching the shadows of summer clouds run over the countryside? I do nothing else in writing this. I watch the shadow of my imaginings run over this paper, scattered flakes forever swept by the wind. Such is the nature of my thoughts and all my intellectual possessions: a little floating vapor about to dissolve. But just as the air delights in condensing the waters’ emanations and peopling itself with beautiful clouds, my imagination seizes the evaporations of my soul, gathers them, shapes them as it pleases, and lets them drift upon the current of the secret breath which passes through every intelligence. This is my instinctive happiness, a fluid and mobile happiness which often melts beneath my kisses and disperses in my embraces. Thus neither my serenities nor my storms endure, alas! Nor do my resolutions remain. Whatever philosophy and practical reason there is in my soul groans and suffers. Like a vessel which has spread too much sail, I hold a mad and blind course through life, suffering the cruelest damage at every hour.

In a painting, one loves and admires the features of an unknown man, sometimes a shepherd dreaming upon the mountain, representing intelligence amid creation, the deep and resonant echo at the center of melodies, the divine mirror upon the route of the innumerable images of the uncreated which God has sent traveling, that floating array of symbols called the universe. The real persons, the shepherd and I, are poor creatures who watch the clouds sail and listen to the wind whistle instinctively, as a pastime of solitude.