I ask myself where is the true center of my existence?  Does my life revolve primarily around external necessities which my environment has gradually imposed on me, or am I a genuinely thought-motivated person paying my respect to Caesar with a cold indifference because I am hidden from the world by an inner encirclement that enables me to take true measure of every mundane intrusion into my privacy?  This is a subject for intense study demanding the utmost honesty.
*
Why communism?  Why God?  If I believe in communism I cannot have much faith in God, for communism implies faith in man to cure his own ills without intervention from a supernatural being.  Communism tells me that through reason man perhaps can solve all the hitherto insoluble enigmas of his earthbound existence.  Faith in God, on the other hand, signals his reliance on divine assistance every step of the way from the cradle to the grave.  What serious piety comes down to is that the quality of every man’s life is wholly dependent on the discretion of some distant, unapproachable abstract force.  Religion therefore, in a sense, can only be associated with man’s aboriginal instincts.  A higher civilization, it would seem, is in itself a negation of divine orientation.
*
New York thoughts: Out of what shell?  What beginning?  I arose and once on my feet walked nonchalantly out of the morning.  There was no entrance, no gate or door separating one area or room from another.  Yet there was no mistaking the fact that I had moved, that I was no longer occupying the same square foot of pavement that had held me just a few moments before.  The world I had left was behind me, and I knew this, even though when I turned around hoping to catch a final glimpse of it before it disappeared, I could detect nothing, not a single remnants of the environment that had so recently embraced me.  It was as far away as a dream only vaguely remembered. Now as I stood still I began scratching my head.  I wanted to answer the question that was gnawing at my brain.  Where am I?  I have stepped into the afternoon without realizing that the hands of the watch on my wrist had moved even the slightest fraction of a second.  I scratched my head again.  I was unconsciously appealing to my faculty of reason, but nothing happened except that I collected a few flakes of dandruff beneath my fingernails.
*
More New York thoughts: How easy it is for me to abandon myself.  I stand in the open air and invite the wind to propel me in any direction it pleases.  And for a while I sail as freely and tranquilly in my mind as any severed leaf.  But the duration of this unobtruded movement is shortlived because I have obligations.  There are root-strings dangling beneath my fluttering body which must be fastened to the soil.  But first I must defy the wind.  I must say, “You have had your fun and I have lain like a feather in your palm. I sincerely thank you for the ride, but now I must be on my way back from where I came.”  Off I go, and when I reach the old familiar landscape, the much climbed hills, the sky under which I have so often meditated and written down my thoughts, I am filled with a feeling of gentle ecstasy.  Only then can I begin the task of fastening down those loose rootends in a soil that will nourish my imagination.  I am home, purged for the moment of any desire for illusory topographies.
*
Another birthday.  It makes no difference whether or not one wishes to go forward.  Time keeps giving one an irresistible nudge.  Once one has condescended, so to speak, to the initial launching there can be no change of mind, no turning around and traveling back through the past until  one reaches the bliss of one’s amoebic state.  Begin and continue.  There is no other choice.  Life is black, the world is a living inferno of suffering, yet one must touch one’s allotment of hard knocks before oblivion can be entered.
*
The most difficult people are not those whose attention is most completely centered upon themselves, but those who are drawn so irresistibly towards you that they eventually become entirely dependent on your presence.  They often construct an invisible wall around you and themselves in order to safeguard  their association with you.  The possibility of losing you terrifies them.  If by chance you were to escape beyond the magnetic field of their attraction they feel certain they would be lost, utterly abandoned and hopelessly unable to cope with the world even on its most ordinary levels.  But since you are not aware of this state they are in regarding you, they are constantly plagued by your thoughtlessness.
*
Camus not long after the Second World War came to the conclusion that there could be no reconciliation between justice and liberty in the West.  One or the other had to go. He was probably right.  Since few people have any real concern for liberty it seems unlikely that it will be defended with any genuine vigor.  Justice, on the other hand, affects nearly everyone and thus everyone will come to its defense, and yet it may be a vile word sounding in the ears of some Americans since its credo for meeting the basic needs of large numbers of people cannot be denied.
*
The great contention dominating our age is between liberty and justice.  Which is more important?  Which is more necessary to most people?  The answer, I would think, is obvious – justice.  Consequently its appeal is extremely powerful.  The masses of men really care nothing for liberty.  Banish injustice from their lives and they will be contented.  Liberty, on the other hand, touches only a small minority of the population.
*
Men are more interested nowadays in the human condition than in individual welfare.  It is the spirit of the times, the tide which no dike can prevent from overwhelming the entire surface of the globe.  The death knell of invividualism has already been sounded.  And as Camus wrote many years ago, it has become immoral to make liberty one’s first concern.  Bertolt Brecht writing in the same vein perhaps a few years earlier put it this way:
“Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?”
*
To put oneself on the side of the tragic element in life is merely a formality signifying resignation.
*
Comprehension of a poem or even one of its lines in the fullest sense is an act of poetic creation.  To understand a work of art is so close to the actual creation of it that the two acts are almost of equal merit.
*
I think we in the West are apt to simplify matters by insisting too strongly that the two major contenders for domination of our collective conscience are liberty and justice.  We in America like to think of ourselves as the chief exponents of liberty, being as we are the proud descendants of Patrick Henry, and yet, on the other hand, we will only begrudgingly concede, if we concede at all, that socialist countries have an edge on us in justice.  Admittedly liberty is very much in the dark in these countries, especially if we judge them on the basis of what we patriotically believe constitutes liberty.  But unless liberty and justice are united in a effective partnership, mankind has indeed a dismal future awaiting it.
*
Perhaps Camus is being too much the ironist when he passes judgment on one of the significant transitions in history: “It requires bucketfuls of blood and centuries of history to lead to an imperceptible modification in the human condition.  Such is the law.  For your heads fall like hail, Terror reigns, Revolution is touted, and one ends up by substituting constitutional monarchy for legitimate monarchy.”
*
Innocence is the equivalent of ignorance.
*
Political rivalry or perhaps competition of any nature brings out the worst in people.
*
Virtually every opinion that a man holds is merely an instrument of self-justification.
*
In Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Samson is filled with a divine fire.  This causes him to keep the faith even when struck down by the most grievous humiliation.  No temptation following the one that he lamentably succumbed to can persuade him from the path of strictest piety.  And even that one temptation that he fell victim to was not really his own fault, for it was predestined for him by the greatest of all schemers, God.  If God was to be the sole motivating force behind all his actions, the cause of every twist and turn in his eventful life for the purpose of liberating the Hebrews from the menace of the Philistines, then Samson deserves to be viewed as the most pitiful creature in all literature.  This element in Milton’s epic indicates that a strong dose of fifth century Athenian drama had taken hold of his imagination.