8

I read a great deal, in fact I read everything I could lay my hands on, and I was exceedingly impressionable. I have an intuitive understanding of the personalities of authors, I seemed to see in each of them a reflection of myself. And I would go on thinking and feeling in the style of a particular book until a new one influenced me in its turn.

In my room, the room where I have set up my own theater, I now sit with a book on my knees, looking up at the paintings and savouring the inflections of the writers to whom I had surrendered myself, and with an unproductive chaos and half-formed thoughts and fanciful images filling my minds.

And each time, new life would be given to me.

7

Was I happy?

But afterall I ate extremely well. I wore the best clothes, and even when I was younger and still at school I had noticed how my poorer and shabilly dressed contemporaries habitually deferred to me and to others like me, treating us with a kind of flaterring diffidence which indicated their wiling acceptence of us like pricesses of fashions. I belonged to the elite, to that class of rich and envied persons whose birthright it is to look down on the poor, the unlucky and the envious with benevolent contempt.

Had I not every reason to be happy?

6

The end of it all, the upshot of life, of my life. Is the disgust with which it fills me. A worthy ending indeed! Disgust with it all, disgust with the whole business, this disgust chokes me, goads me to frenzy and casts me down again into despair, sooner or later, no doubt it will give me the necessary impetus to cut short the whole ridiculous , contemptible affair and clear out for good.

True enough, I may well hold out a month or two yet, maybe for another three or six months, I shall carry on eating, sleeping and passing the time, in the same mechanical, calm and well-ordered fashion in which my life has outwardly gone by all these four seasons, contrasting so hideous with the vile process of my inner disintegration.

Why, I wonder?

For I realised that indifference would be happiness of a kind.

5

Have you not wonder what life could be like if there's no you? Walking about with no directions. No past nor present. Just live each day by each without knowing what comes next. Believing what is real and what is not, is nothing compared to not believing in anything at all.

I have no intention of making a life with anyone. Not yet, aleast. One might wonder why. It is not proposal I cherish, it is the person. It is the flickers or sparks I seek. I rather not know now, than regret later as I will bring the extra companion along. It is not fair for him. It wouldn't be fair to me.

I want to live, dammit!

Then, let me.