“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”

There are no words for what you did to me.

But I am too tired to write, too driven, too screaming inside. I feel too fiercely to write, even to talk. It is no good to be alone either; though one makes no noise the screaming is all there.

“I don't feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse.”

I've been deceived too often; I've ceased to form attachments, to permit myself to feel attractions.

“I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.”

“If I want to hide / forever, let me.”

“Words! be / sick as I am sick,”

“And I’m a master of speaking silently—all my life I’ve spoken silently and I’ve lived through entire tragedies in silence.”

“That’s the horror of it for me, that I understand everything!”

“I do not really know whether I have survived. My inner self has shut itself up more and more. As though to protect itself, it has become inaccessible even to me,”

“I am sick, sick. With this desperate fury.”

“And again the dark eats me: (…)”

“…I’m fed up with myself—with my difficulty in expressing myself in words about anything. I’m imprisoned in myself—even symbolically.”

“Nobody speaks to me. People fall in love with me, and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me and—and all that sort of thing. But no one speaks to me. I sometimes think that no one can. Can you?”

What am I going to talk about? About this man I am now? About what I have become? About this dark, plain man sunk deep into an anguish that he cannot clarify or justify because the reasons for it are inexplicable?