Inner Turbulence

My isolation from everything remained the same during the past year. I had surrendered myself to melancholy and it had taken me prisoner.

I experienced the whole of this past winter as one unending inner turbulence, which I find difficult to describe. I had long since become used to my loneliness--that did not oppress me: I live with my fantasies, my imagination, and my dreams that are both my fate and my ideal. This was enough to sustain me, for everything pointed toward vastness and space--it all pointed toward a vastness. And that vastness was not an oppressive void, but a space filled with imagined delights. But none of these dreams, none of these thoughts obeyed me, none were at my beck and call, I could not write about them as I pleased. They came and took me, I was ruled by them, was their vessel.

I was always preoccupied with myself. And I longed desperately to really live for once, to give something of myself to the world, to enter into a relationship and battle with it. Sometimes when I walked through the streets in the evening, unable to return before midnight because I was so restless, I felt that now at this very moment I would meet someone -- as he or she walked past me at the next street corner, or called to me (I'm imagining this) from the nearest window. At other times all of this seemed unbearably painful and I longed for oblivion.