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Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue What have we after that to look forward to?
July 1950 – I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me.
In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in.
have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.”
“But it doesn’t always have to be that way. We could be together some day for always.” “Oh, no,” I told him, wondering if he knew it was all over. “We keep running till we die. We separate, get further apart, till we are dead.”
There is only continual motion. If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach.
All I need to do is keep my judgment, sense of balance and philosophic sense of humor, and I’ll be fine, no matter what happens. If character is fate, I sure am adjusting mine under my lucky star –
And just a little while ago it was summer time, and I was walking with Bob along the quiet, green, leaf-arched streets, looking up at my window, wondering how it would feel to be on the other, the inside. Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person. Because for all the theories about condensation and a temperature above 32°, for all that, it is pleasant for the optical nerves to register the impulse of floating, frozen ashes, of motion that enhances space behind.
Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental.
to know that for those qualities I covet in others, those same others covet qualities in still others.
What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind and stupid. I am not a veteran, passing my legless, armless days in a wheelchair. I am not that mongoloidish old man shuffling out of the gates of the mental
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I don’t believe in God as a kind father in the sky. I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the bold, the loud-mouthed, the cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the mighty in arms and will, who march over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots.
Do vegetarians rot more rapidly than meat-eaters?
They’re really going to mash the world up this time, the damn fools.
What obsession do men have for destruction and murder?
have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
God, how I love it all. And who am I, God-whom-I-don’t-believe-in? God-who-is-my-alter-ego? Suddenly the turn table switches to a higher speed, and in the whizzing that ensues I loose track of my identity. I act and react, and suddenly I wonder “Where is the girl that I was last year? … Two years ago? … What would she think of me now?”
I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost …
Why am I so perturbed by what others rejoice in and take for granted? Why am I so obsessed? Why do I hate what I am being drawn into so inexorably?
My enemies are those who care about me most. First: my mother. Her pitiful wish is that I “be happy.” Happy!
Above all, CAN A SELFISH EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGITIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTH WHILE?
