Caution and procrastination are my principal weaknesses as a lover. One must pursue a woman as one would dive into a cool refreshing stream on a hot summer day. I am generally so skilled at feigning an attitude of indifference I nearly always end up being too convincing and thus am left with nothing more substantial than sweet memories which, as happy and consoling as they might be, are still nevertheless abstractions falling far short of satisfying those vast emotional hungers stirring beneath the epidermis of my placid exterior.

I often deliver imaginary lectures to people and even write letters to them in my mind which I am incapable of inscribing on paper. The cause or motivation behind such imaginings is usually a breakdown in actual communications between myself and the person I am addressing.
*
The need for emotional involvement can burn like a fever. It can become like a sickness when not fulfilled. Then starts a permanent mood of depression. Poetry is like a whip in my hands with which I try to ward off this persistent hound. I am constantly contradicting my own nature by deliberately compelling myself to seek emotional independence, to nurture a private citadel as a sanctuary from my fellowman. Experience has induced in me a tendency to shy away from intimacy. Yet the tragedy of my confused gropings after contentedness rests firmly upon the foundation that intimacy is exactly what I yearn for more than anything else.
*
Why is the emotion of love so necessary to me at times? Not infrequently those I love most either refuse me altogether or else show themselves incapable of returning my affections with an intensity equal to my own. This leads me to speculate on the hitherto unrecognized possibility that I am really not interested in being loved and that all I am seeking is someone who can be set up on a pedestal as an object for my passionate imagination.
*
And now I consider all her loveliness to be as nebulous and ungraspable as a dream. I am filled with feelings of exhilaration only when my meditations lack that photographic vividness which drains life of its essential mystery. Knowledge and facts are the antitheses of each other. When we are in love we are in a state of divine intoxication and as such are unable to define ourselves or be defined by anyone else. A man in love is a universe unto himself. He is in touch with infinity and yet bound to the earth by his own feelings. A lover represents a living contradiction of all the civilizing forces which sober mankind has contrived.
*
Because I know what I shouldn’t do is hardly a sufficient constraint to prevent me from undertaking a hazardous action. I grow aware of certain evils which tempt me again and again, and yet still move in the exact direction in which the winds of temptation are propelling me.
*
I must not permit myself to be persuaded to act against my natural inclinations by the opinions of others. Oh, if only I could be as infallible and pure as the creature I envision and be a slave to the usual host of pressures that beset most ordinary men. But alas, I too, despite my high-sounding ambition to act immaculately, founder in a sea of ulterior motives. I too am as impure as a cesspool even when contemplating the most angelic intentions.
*
Perhaps the most prevalent cause of tragedy in human life is the failure of people to communicate with each other.
*
I must learn to reflect less and sense more. I must not forever be seeing events and people in their proper perspective thus losing so much of the richness which can only be gained from a full and immediate perception turned in upon itself. I must open my senses and drink.
*
The whole situation is ridiculous, or at least it seems so whenever I try to examine it from a theoretical distance. But is it really? Are we incapable of falling (stumbling, I should say) irretrievably into a fit of ecstasy over each other? Perhaps it simply comes down to this: I am emotionally starved and she has by chance, that is fortuitously, or by fate, dropped into my orbit at the opportune moment. We have not, as yet, anyway, involved ourselves in any outward display of physical passion. There have been no great mutually enveloping scenes, but merely slight, barely perceptible anatomical contacts and fleeting visual exchanges which signify a kind of instinctive understanding that excludes everyone but ourselves. This latter point is especially noteworthy because they generally occur in the company of others. If this is all, and I mean by all the beginning and end of everything that has thus far taken place between us, then ought I not be honest enough with myself to admit that these sparks of infatuation have proven themselves quite capable of setting my whole being aflame. The present condition of my mind is one of chaotic confusion. The turmoil which has entrapped me is not only enervating but disarming because it drains me of those energies necessary for the performance of every other task which engages me. Her image glows inside my mind like a high powered unextinguishable lamp obstructing the lucidity of every move I wish to make.
*
I really have no one to blame but myself. My entanglements are like a whirlpool into which I have rowed my boat in a state of perfect consciousness.
*
Has life been so good to me that it has failed to grant me my quota of unhappiness?
*
It is so peaceful, so quiet as the sun feels its way slowly along the black empty asphalt of this Sunday street. I can’t help but believe that most men are made unhappy solely by their own thoughts. The basic physical world is never disturbed by the multitude of disharmonies that seethe upon its surface. It is always at ease, even when the great masses of men are out on a rampage cutting each other’s throat over a misplaced comma in a rabble-rouser’s sentence.
*
The earth is ceaselessly moving and changing just as men must keep moving their limbs and their minds if they are to remain functioning creatures. An artist is more sensitive to these earth-changes than the ordinary man. He is conscious of the slightest variations in color and the most minute nuances of mood in other people, yet there is always the solid perch from which he does his observing.
*
Too much talk and too little action tends to turn me into a very high-strung individual. When this fit is on I am capable of insulting people without any feeling of remorse immediately afterwards. When time has elapsed and I have slipped back into my more rational self…well…that is another matter. One of my shortcomings is the ease with which I am tempted to associate with people. Let anyone come along with a foolhardy suggestion for participating in some enterprise involving congenial companionship and off I will go even against my better judgment. The only solution for correcting this tendency is to put my will power to full use in constructing an imaginary moat around myself which will not only discourage people from coming too close to me but also make it a particularly grinding effort for me to obtrude into their haunts.
*
The symptoms are everywhere apparent. A natural proclivity to caution plus a reluctance to commit my feelings to another person often causes me to hesitate about making any advances toward intimacy. And yet I have touched and caressed her at least a dozen times during the past twenty-four hours. Then why do I keep repeating to myself “No! No! No!” as thought the ghost of my puritan father had arisen from the nether land and intruded into my subconscious mind to warn me that I was walking blindly toward some ineluctable abyss? His wagging finger has filled me with trepidation even when I most wanted to take her into my arms and cover her face with a hundred kisses. But why tantalize myself with thoughts of my own irresolution?
*
The action contains all. It defies discussion and asks for neither protagonists nor antagonists. All it needs is sufficient air and space to allow for the free exercise of its limbs. It is its own justification. Those who would advocate it solely by word of mouth with no intention of participating in it must be living outside its orbit. The happy lover, for instance, is not a man of words, but a highly sensitized instrument acting as his beckoning heart commands. His brain is the least active of his organs. Does not D.H. Lawrence in his “Corot” poem say, “Imitate the magnificent trees/That speak no word of their rapture, but only/Breathe largely the luminous breeze.”
*
Nothing is easier than to be critical of your friends, and especially those you love. Most people have a nose for scandal and since life is generally dull, even boring for many of them, they combine this deplorable tendency in their nature with a desire for amusement. The result is that any rumor that promises both entertainment and an opportunity for moral indignation, giving the tattle-taler and his eager listener a sense of moral superiority, becomes fair game for all whose lack of scruples allows them to join in the fun.
*
Since no one has many real friends I see no reason why a young man should feel at odds with himself because he is unable to reach any depth of understanding with his acquaintances. Not even a man and woman who are, so to speak, sexually compatible and perhaps have sealed their relationship with a marriage license, can expect much in the way of true friendship from each other.
*
The greatest tragedy that can befall a man who is in love with a woman is to suddenly discover that she is unequal to his affections. He is left with a feeling that all has been in vain and even though he has not been totally unappreciated, his loved one is far behind on the road which he had deluded himself into believing they were advancing along together arm in arm. His first reaction to this unexpected shock is confused disappointment. Thoughts of resentment begin flashing through his brain. He resolves to reveal his thoughts to her directly, no matter how much pain or disagreeableness it might cause. He must punish her in any way he can, even if it is only with a tongue lashing. His pride has been bruised. But then just as suddenly thoughts of philosophic restraint intrude into his mind and wedge their way between his normal congeniality and his bitterness. Philosophy is like a white bearded friend who lays a hand upon his shoulder to ease the lingering sting. It tells him he must hold his breath until his overheated mind has been touched by the comforting breezes of reason. Now as he regains his equilibrium he begins to replace his bitterness with understanding. He tries to ascertain the ways in which he is different from other men and how such differences manifest themselves in his actions.

The person he loves has interests which are far more diffuse than his own. Intensity of any kind is entirely alien to this person not because she lacks a capacity for it but because she has interests which are spread over too wide an area, consequently her life has become a series of journeys from one barely felt amusement to another. Granted, in the beginning these amusements were no doubt psychologically necessary distractions, but the primary preoccupation they were originally intended to relieve has long since been forgotten. The magnetic pull of the central interest has vanished leaving the diversions in its wake, which have already become self-sustaining.
*
What an obstacle to understanding another person the cramped dimensions of the human mind can be. How eager people are to defame or to believe the defamer. No task is more difficult than that of setting people straight about someone who has previously been presented to them in a misleading, grotesque form. I must learn to stick to the truth about a person as I myself see him or her and not be swayed by hearsay or the bad experience someone else has had with that person.
*
Rather than try to rack my brain attempting to discover what is essential about certain people I know I find it much easier, and more rewarding too, to sit back and watch them paint their own portrait with their own words and actions. Surely this is the most reliable method for acquiring knowledge about them. Any other approach must necessarily become a projection of my own desire for them to be what I wish them to be, in other words, a falsification of what they actually are. It would be like walking through a mirror reflecting my own image to discover someone else and thereby distorting the truth about myself and the other person.
*
I have known B. for approximately six months and in that short time he seems to have displayed a personality containing a sufficient variety of poses to keep my interest in him alive. But lately this interest has been flagging. Although I was never duped into believing he traveled very deep beneath the surface of any of those projects towards which he professed an enthusiastic attachment, I did find his manner, or more accurately, the angle from which he viewed the world, amusing, therefore I kept coming back for more of him. I could sense that his enthusiasms were unstable. He always seemed ready to change horses before the one he was riding carried him to any previously announced destination. Now I wonder if it was not my own exuberance over the skill of his horsemanship and the goal I was convinced he was aiming at that attracted me to him. What arouses my suspicion is that today I find him riding with the same avid intensity and skill on an old decrepit nag towards a mist of vague destinations. Each change in the weather produces an alteration in his direction.
*
All unhappiness is due to brooding upon one’s own difficulties. Alas! I am paralyzed by my own thoughts!
*
Nothing can hold my attention. I am in one of those moods in which the changing panorama that is before me attracts my sense of sight without exciting even the most peripheral surfaces of my mind.
*
I like the philosophy which tells me that the means by which certain goals are reached contain both good and evil. You must do the good thing today, now, at this very moment, for by the time tomorrow is poised on the crest of your horizon an entirely different demand will be blowing its breath in your face. Thus our ends have no intrinsic value. They simply happen because we have forced them to happen, while the characteristics by which they are identified are not their own, but an acquired personality, you might say, achieved through machinations that preceded them.
*
Within me exist twin desires for both the lofty and prosaic, desires which are complementary rather than antagonistic to each other. My life is a constant movement back and forth between the two, much like a man in a prison cell pacing to and fro between opposite yet equally blank walls. Perhaps I have here the key to the unity of opposite and seemingly incompatible desires.
*
Paul Claudel wrote, “…each living being has his predestined task with its provision of energy.”
*
It is not my failure to write poems which troubles me most, but that the effort to clear my mind of all obstructing debris before I can even begin to think about them is so great that I am left in a perpetual state of enervation. As greater mastery over the art of poetry is acquired inadequate impulses are relied upon less and less. The mighty gushing forth comes forth only after the mind has been thoroughly vacuumed and scrubbed.
*
Being in a cynical mood today, like Oscar Wilde, I can almost believe that morality has always been a matter of convenience. Those who have been adjudged immoral were simply people whose sense of convenience was at odds with that of the majority.

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