I Am Exulansis

“She loved her more than anyone, more than anyone, anyone in the world, and every night she loved her more than anyone.”

“I am more beautiful here, more loving, more sincere.”

Imagination belongs to the same chain of significations as the anticipation of death. Imagination is basically the relationship with death. The image is death.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.

I wish, in a way, that we could put the clock back a year. I should like to startle you again,–even though I didn’t know then that you were startled.

People are very wearisome, really, aren’t they? I mean I feel I know exactly what they’re all going to say long before they’ve said it.

…feeling myself to be only a black dot in the middle of a frighteningly flat whiteness…

Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941 when the German bombing campaign against England was at / its peak and when she was reading Freud whom she had staved off until then. / The hideous vocabulary of mental science crushed her dazzling / star-thoughts into powder and brought her latent despair into the open air. / Is there, perhaps, a quality in each person—hidden like a laugh inside a sob—that loves even more than / it loves to live?

You’re like someone crossing a border daily / a person who is to itself unknown. / You’re like a fragment that can’t find what has lost it / or illuminate / what’s going on or what it’s seeing through. / A person–the first I / with few verbs left. / Vertical even when you laugh.

…And now the horrid winter lap begins; the pale unbecoming days, a vast sorrow at the back of it all. I must rinse & freshen my mind and make it work on something hard.

Everything pains me. The merest trifle rouses a sense of abandonment. I’m impatient with other people, their will to live, their universe. Attracted by a decision to withdraw from everyone.

I still struggle: and still, thank Heaven, feel the rush and the glory and the agony, and never get used to any of it. But I can’t write this morning. I shall not press the mood till it returns naturally.

She was like fate–a consummate mistress of all the arts of self preservation: hair rolled & lustrous; eyes so nonchalant; nothing could startle her; people going & coming all the time; she not looking, yet knowing, fearing nothing, expecting nothing.

But all this is absurd, I’m tired, I cannot at this moment express all I was thinking a while ago.

…How resilient I am; & how fatalistic now; and how little I mind, & how much; & how tired I am today…