9 October 1922 – 15 October 1922

I have been thinking this morning until it seems I may get things straightened out if I try to write . . . where I am. Ever since I came to Paris I have been as ill as ever. In fact, yesterday I thought I was dying. It is not imagination. My heart is so exhausted and so tied up that I can only walk to the taxi and back. I get up at midi and go to bed at 5.30. 1 try to ' work ' by fits and starts, but the time has gone by. I cannot work. Ever since April I have done practically nothing. But why? Because, although M.'s treatment improved my blood and made me look well and did have a good effect on my lungs, it made my heart not a snap better, and I only won that improvement by living the life of a corpse in the Victoria Palace Hotel. My spirit is nearly dead. My spring of life is so starved that it's just not dry. Nearly all my improved health is pretence — acting. What does it amount to? Can I walk? Only creep. Can I do anything with my hands or body? Nothing at all. I am an absolutely helpless invalid. What is my life? It is the existence of a parasite. And five years have passed now, and I am in straighter bonds than ever. Ah, I feel a little calmer already to be writing. Thank God for writing! I am so terrified of what I am going to do. All the voices out of the ' Past ' say " Don't do it." J. says " M. is a scientist. He does his part. It's up to you to do yours." But that is no good at all. I can no more cure my psyche than my body. Less it seems to me. Isn't J. himself, perfectly fresh and well, utterly depressed by boils on his neck? Think of five years' imprisonment. Someone has got to help me to get out. If that is a confession of weakness — it is. But it's only lack of imagination that calls it so. And who is going to help me ? Remember Switzerland : "I am helpless." Of course, he is. One prisoner cannot help another. Do I believe in medicine alone? No, never. In science alone? No, never. It seems to me childish and ridiculous to suppose one can be cured like a cow if one is not a cow. And here, all these years, I have been looking for someone who agreed with me. I have heard of G. who seems not only to agree but to know infinitely more about it. Why hesitate ? Fear. Fear of what? Doesn't it come down to fear of losing J. ? I believe it does. But, good Heavens ! Face things. What have you of him now? What is your re- lationship ? He talks to you — sometimes — and then goes off. He thinks of you tenderly. He dreams of a life with you some day when the miracle has hap- pened. You are important to him as a dream. Not as a living reality. For you are not one. What do you share? Almost nothing. Yet there is a deep, sweet, tender flooding of feeling in my heart which is love for him and longing for him. But what is the good of it as things stand ? Life together, with me ill, is simply tor- ture with happy moments. But it's not life. . . . You do know that J. and you are only a kind of dream of what might be. And that might-be never, never can be true unless you are well. And you won't get well by * imagining ' or ' waiting ' or trying to bring off that miracle yourself. Therefore if the Grand Lama of Thibet promised to help you — how can you hesitate? Risk! Risk any- thing! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. True, Tchehov didn't. Yes, but Tchehov died. And let us be honest. How much do we know of Tchehov from his letters? Was that all? Of course not. Don't you suppose he had a whole longing life of which there is hardly a word? Then read the final letters. He has given up hope. If you de-sentimentalize those final letters they are terrible. There is no more Tchehov. Illness has swallowed him. But perhaps to people who are not ill, all this is non- sense. They have never travelled this road. How can they see where I am? All the more reason to go boldly forward alone. Life is not simple. In spite of all we say about the mystery of Life, when we get down to it we want to treat it as though it were a child's tale. . . . Now, Katherine, what do you mean by health ? And what do you want it for ? Answer : By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the ex- ternal world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is super- ficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capa- ble of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it's no good — there's only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun. Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. I wrote this for myself. I shall now risk sending it to J. He may do with it what he likes. He must see how much I love him. And when I say i I fear ' — don't let it disturb you, dearest heart. We all fear when we are in waiting- rooms. Yet we must pass beyond them, and if the other can keep calm, it is all the help we can give each other. . . . And this all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy — deep down. All is well.

Nietzsche's Birthday. Sat in the Luxem- bourg Gardens. Cold, wretchedly unhappy. Horrid people at lunch, everything horrid, from anfang bis zum ende.