So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?

[...] l'homme, lui aussi, est un être dualiste. Le problème de son âme consiste dans le conflit entre le physique et le métaphysique, et tout ce qui est social demeure secondaire.

Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast,
And each will wrestle for the mastery there.

But what reality was ever made by realists?

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.

I hate the way my life has been inexplicably overwhelmed by questionnaires. Life is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than the lists that reduce it to an anorexic assembly of tics and obsessions.