There comes a point when a man can no more read than he can write, and when every word seems equal to every other word, and every experience, composed of mere words, is ready to collapse under his grasp as if it were made of no finer stuff than sand, and even metaphors slip away, being somehow irrelevant and useless, and entirely without shame. When I look around me, I am struck by the sheer inadequacy of things, places, and people, an inadequacy that redounds back always to myself. It is I, sleepless and alone, who am inadequate; my straining ambitions cannot be contained in a body, and yet I am bound to limbs, bound to words, bound to flesh. There is something endlessly unsatisfying about being human, which, if we would only allow ourselves time to think about it instead of running in every which direction, might strike us wholly and in the very core of our being. That all sounds, all sights, and all smells, not to mention memory, knowledge, and the very stuff of thought itself, are all composed and only made of singular atoms, convulsing and repulsed in an infinite void, is a thought to chill the spine and freeze the mind. What is this wide space of being? Where every atom, alone in its isolate, penultimate self strikes the final chord that moves the whole line, domino by domino, into being and touch and sight? Can this cruel world, infinitely large and infinitely distant, be endured?

All I know is that I am hated; I am hated and derided, disliked and disapproved. By whom? Faces, faces of the mass down below, faces labeled with words, faces always beyond and yet always flickering in the cold vision of my mind. Meanwhile I sit like a little crutch on the smooth chair, caught up in the expansiveness of it all; sleepless, timeless, collapsing into nothing when all I want is being. But not this being; that is the irony of death - we fear life. We want - a life, a particular life - not ours, but not death. Are these the only alternatives, to live or to die? Non-being seems scarcely worse than being, but scarcely better.

When I write, Im haunted round by many authors. Their whispering voices, as if craving the immortality they lack or the mortality I have, surround me as if I were slaying beasts for blood on the edge of Acheron, and each brings his toll to the resounding upper steel. It is a steel earth, it is a steel ground, all metal; the things springing out of it, little green things, can hardly hold our attention.

And yet what an amazing thing man is. I am not surprised that people worshipped him long after and before he was a god, the God. Is it less blasphemous that we should raise the creature of infinite complexity whom we do not understand, even to this day, in every department of every university - long lines of men accustomed to study! - to the status and level of a god, the God, than that we should lower him to our standard, lower him to our breath? But God is something like him, God breathes him into the air, breathes the wind into his body; he forges steel, he bends the earth, the dominion, that is domination, of all creatures winged or flying, earth-bound or crawling, swimming or circumscribed to sea, these are all his. And yet with a body like Narcissus' and a beauty like Appollo's, has he no justice? Am I infinitely alone? And yet I too am a statue - as he is - a lonely statue. Life devolves into ruins. Are you ever afraid that we are nothing more than a group of statues, or - true to the earth, true to death - that the statues we see lying round in broken columns round cracking temples are the truest portrait, most faithful invocation of our souls?

I like a certain rhythm in language. When I write, I like the phrases to come together in way that is pleasing to my ear, that flows; so much so that I forget all about meaning - I will repeat myself endlessly, just to hear something again that I like. When I was a youth, I would say, "Hello" out loud to myself, on a sunny day in the middle of the playground, just to hear my voice, to check that I could still speak. How fresh everything was then. And how good to be alone. I created entire worlds for myself, manufactured them, returned day after day. Always I was in the center of a vast cosmos to be saved, always threatened with the temerity of timorous danger. Now I create worlds in words; but they are somewhat more lonely, somewhat more empty; always I am caught by the rhythm like the smooth rising and falling of waves, and left on shore by the sea, waiting out, as if I were trapped on an island, abandoned, beached.

And for all that, what a curious thing it is, solitude. Because solitude cures nothing. To wander around on one's own is to be in pain. But I can't find a way not to - I cant find a way to connect with others. I try desperately - but it is not a simple matter, I think, of being with other people. One can be lonely, as they say, in the middle of a crowd. Because the crowd doesn't turn towards you, the crowd doesn't notice you, and I think that if a pike came through your heart and your blood bled all over the floor, they would hardly think but for fear of themselves and it would always be their loss. But it cannot be my loss, not my loss to them.

What ridiculous creatures we are, or want to be. For love of one another we would go so far as to put each other inside ourselves - the intimacy of a surrounding embrace, being contained like being wombed, returning to birth in making life - and yet, for all the effort, if we could have it that one skin enter another, if we could crawl into the deep folds of another human being, but for his own pleasure, I scarcely think he would know we were there. Or his pain. Wars, loves, sorrows - everything is communicated but incommunicable, and in the space of this I can only feel awe or emptiness. If it is awe, then I immediately turn to God, some feeble recollection of a substance, the thing that makes all things; if it is emptiness - well death is hardly more bitter, and hardly less rewarding - or it couldn't be less rewarding. Couldn't possibly be. I have heard it said that there is a certain providence in the fall of a sparrow - but I think it is my providence, it is my own mind, rambling and turning in on itself, and consuming everything in its wake - or it is a metaphor of the dying sparrow or it is just the collision of atoms in a world colliding with atoms, by which I mean my mind.

Give me whatever excuses for withholding your love. I can take them. I have embraced a world of pain before, and I can do so again, and I even expect that it will get worse, for all things degrade with time. This expectation, this bitterness I can bear - for there is always in becoming accustomed to such things the chance and hope of a still heat that still, nonetheless, is heat; passion is hardly less consuming, but much more sweet to be a burning, smoking forest of rage and pain than to be left cold and alone. Serenity is akin to solitude, but much more precious and more rare. It is repose in oneself. I wish I could rest without my hatred of the wide world, the wide world in front of eyes I can't efface, and the wide sound behind ears I can't tear, and the wide touch behind feelings I can't dismiss, and a love and a need that will not go away.