[BNP/E3, 20 – 1–7]
1.
No soul more loving or tender than mine has ever existed, no soul so full of kindness, of pity, of all the things of tenderness and of love. Yet no soul is so lonely as mine — not lonely, be it noted, from exterior, but from interior circumstances. I mean this: together with my great tenderness and kindness an element of an entirely opposite kind enters into my character, an element of sadness, of self-centredness, of selfishness therefore, whose effect is two-fold: to warp and hinder the development and full internal play of those other qualities, and to hinder, by affecting the will depressingly, their full external play, their manifestation. One {…}
[2r]
2
I shall analyse this, one day I shall examine better, discriminate, the elements of my character, for my curiosity of all things, linked to my curiosity for myself and for my own character, leads to one attempt to understand my personality.
_______
It was on account of these characteristics that I wrote, describing myself, in the “Winter Day”:
One like Rousseau...
A misanthropic lover of mankind.
I have, as a matter of fact, many, too many, affinities with Rousseau. In certain things our characters are identical. The
[3r]
3
warm, intense, inexpressible love of mankind, and the portion of selfishness balancing it — this is a fundamental characteristic of his character and, as well, of mine.
_______
My intense patriotic suffering, my intense desire of bettering the condition of Portugal provoke in me — how to express with what warmth, with what intensity, with what sincerity! — a thousand plans which, even if one man could realise them, he had to have one characteristic which in me is purely negative — the power of will. But
[4r]
4.
I suffer — on the very brink of madness, I swear it — as if I could do all and was unable to do it, by deficiency of will. The suffering is horrible. It holds me constantly, I say, on the brink of madness.
And then ununderstood. No one suspects my patriotic love, intenser than that of everyone I meet, of everyone I know. I do not betray it; how do I then know they have it not? How can I tell their case is not such as mine. Because in some cases, in most, their temperament is entirely different; because, in the other cases they speak in a way which reveals the non-existence at least of a warm patriotism.
[5r]
5.
The warmth, the intensity — tender, revolted and eager, of mine I shall never express, so as not to be believed, if ever express at all.
Besides my patriotic projects — writing of “Portuguese Regicide” — to provoke a revolution here, writing of Portuguese pamphlets, editing of older national literary works, creation of a magazine, of a scientific review, etc. — other plans, consuming me with the necessity of being soon carried out — Jean Seul projects, critique of Binet-Sanglé, etc. — combine to produce an excess of impulse that paralyses my will. The suffering that this produces I know not if it can be described as on this side of insanity.
Add to all this other reasons
[6r]
6
still for suffering, some physical, others mental, the susceptibility to every small thing that can cause pain (or even that to a normal man could not cause any pain), add this to other things still, complications, money difficulties — join this all to my fundamentally unbalanced temperament and you may be able to suspect what my suffering is.
Alexander Search.
_______
- 30–10–08 –
= One of my mental complications — horrible beyond words — is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity. I am partly in that state betrayed as his by Rollinat in the opening poem (I think) of his “Névroses.” Impulses cri-
[7r]
7.
minal some, insane others, reaching, amid my agony, a horrible tendency to action, a terrible muscularity, felt in the muscles, I mean — these are common with me and the horror of them and of their intensity — greater than ever now both in number and in intensity — cannot be described.
