Dit zijn de laatste notities uit Amiels dagboek. Hij overleed op 11 mei.
March 28, 1881.—I cannot work; I find it difficult to exist. One may be glad to let one’s friends spoil one for a few months; it is an experience which is good for us all; but afterward? How much better to make room for the living, the active, the productive.
“Tircis, voici le temps de prendre sa retraite.”Is it that I care so much to go on living? I think not. It is health that I long for—freedom from suffering.
And this desire being vain, I can find no savor in anything else. Satiety. Lassitude. Renunciation. Abdication. “In your patience possess ye your souls.”
April 10, 1881. (Sunday).—Visit to ——. She read over to me letters of 1844 to 1845—letters of mine. So much promise to end in so meager a result! What creatures we are! I shall end like the Rhine, lost among the sands, and the hour is close by when my thread of water will have disappeared.
Afterward I had a little walk in the sunset. There was an effect of scattered rays and stormy clouds; a green haze envelops all the trees—
“Et tout renaît, et déjà l’aubépine A vu l’abeille accourir à ses fleurs,” —but to me it all seems strange already.Later.—What dupes we are of our own desires!... Destiny has two ways of crushing us—by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them. But he who only wills what God wills escapes both catastrophes. “All things work together for his good.”
April 14, 1881.—Frightful night; the fourteenth running, in which I have been consumed by sleeplessness....
April 15, 1881.—To-morrow is Good Friday, the festival of pain. I know what it is to spend days of anguish and nights of agony. Let me bear my cross humbly.... I have no more future. My duty is to satisfy the claims of the present, and to leave everything in order. Let me try to end well, seeing that to undertake and even to continue, are closed to me.
April 19, 1881.—A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart fail me.
“Que vivre est difficile, ô mon coeur fatigué!”
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