![]() And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For extreme concentration knows no effort. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. This is why there is never enough time at one’s disposal, for the roads are long and it is easy to go astray, there are even times when one becomes afraid and has the desire-even without any constraint or enticement-to run back (a desire always severely punished later on), how much more so if one were suddenly to receive a kiss from the most beloved lips! I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. ![]() This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. Writing that springs from the surface of existence- when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up-is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake. For writing means revealing oneself to excess that utmost of selfrevelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind-for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive -even that degree of selfrevelation and surrender is not enough for writing. Listen, in that case I could not write (I can’t do much, anyway), but in that case I could not write at all. “You once said you would like to sit beside me while I write. ![]() There are times, dearest, when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.” And what is it that sustains you, the idea of Judaism or of God? Are you aware, and this is the most important thing, of a continuous relationship between yourself and a reassuringly distant, if possibly infinite height or depth? He who feels this continuously has no need to roam about like a lost dog, mutely gazing around with imploring eyes he never need yearn to slip into a grave as if it were a warm sleeping bag and life a cold winter night and when climbing the stairs to his office he never need imagine that he is careering down the well of the staircase, flickering in the uncertain light, twisting from the speed of his fall, shaking his head with impatience. Except in relation to your fellow men, have you ever known uncertainty? Have you ever observed how, within yourself and independent of other people, diverse possibilities open up in several directions, thereby actually creating a ban on your every movement? Have you ever, without giving the slightest thought to anyone else, been in despair simply about yourself? Desperate enough to throw yourself on the ground and remain there beyond the Day of Judgment? How devout are you? You go to the synagogue but I dare say you have not been recently. “I am sitting down to write in a state of some confusion I have been reading a lot of different things that are merging into one another, and if one hopes to find a solution for oneself by this kind of reading, one is mistaken one comes up against a wall, and cannot proceed. ![]()
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