Sometimes roused by desires (say, the trip to Tunisia), but they're desires of before--somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before.--Today it is a flat, dreary country--virtually without water--and paltry.

Everyone is “extremely nice”—and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis”).

Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book--Stubbornness, secrecy.

Everything pains me. The merest trifle rouses a sense of abandonment.I'm impatient with other people, their will to live, their universe. Attracted by a decision to withdraw from everyone [no longer bearing the world of Y].

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign "wretchedness of man," used by Pascal.

Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.

Since I've been taking care of her, the last six months in fact, she was "everything" for me, and I've completely forgotten that I'd written. I was no longer anything but desperately hers.

People tell you to keep your "courage" up. But the time for courage is when she was sick, when I took care of her and saw her suffering, her sadness, and when I had to conceal my tears. Constantly one had to make a decision, put on a mask and that was courage.--Now, courage means the will to live and there's all too much of that.