My past is everything I failed to be.

I took off the mask and looked in the mirror.I was the same child I was years ago.I hadn't changed at all...That's the advantage of knowing how to remove your mask.You're still the child,The past that lives on,The child.I took off the mask, and I put it back on,It's better this way.This way I'm the mask.And I return to normality as to a streetcar terminus.11 August 1934

I should explain that I really did travel, but everything smacks to me of merely telling myself that I travelled, although I didn’t. I carried back and forth, from north to south and east to west, the weariness of having had a past, the disquiet of living a present, and the tedium of having to have a future. And yet I struggle so hard to remain entirely in the present, killing inside me the past and the future.

I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.