I long to abandon myself entirely to someone else. The peculiarity of my character is that I never feel that there is any mingling—either I don’t “abdicate,” & the other person loses, or I do, and I lose myself. A monstrous infantile shell of egotism inside which I quietly asphyxiate. To read K.M.’s [Katherine Mansfield’s] dreams of a shared life with Murry—this perturbs me greatly….To live quietly and complementarily with another would be extraordinary—almost impossible—I don’t know, it’s only the fact that I do nothing for anybody that promotes these self-searchings.
