[I] have not lost my peace, but my soul is troubled, still I am master of it. Oh, Lord! If only I could remember my mission, that through oneself must be manifested (shine) divinity. But the difficulty is, that if you remember that alone you will not live; and you must live, live energetically, and yet remember. Help me, Father.
[I] have prayed much lately that my life be better. But as it is, the consciousness of the lawlessness of my life is shameful and depressing.
Yesterday I thought very well about Hadji Murad—that in it the principal thing was to express a deception of trust. How good it would have been, were it not for this deception. Also I am thinking more and more often of The Appeal.
I am afraid that the theme of art has occupied me lately for personal, selfish and bad reasons. Je m’entends.
During this time I made few notes and if I had been thinking about anything I have forgotten it.
1) The world which we know and represent for ourselves, is nothing else than laws of co-relation between our senses (sens), and therefore, a miracle is a violation of these laws of co-relation, it therefore destroys our conception of the world. In the crudest form, it is thus: I know that water (not frozen) is always liquid. And its specific gravity is less than that of my body. My eyes, hearing, touch, demonstrate to me liquid water; and suddenly a man walks on this water. If he walked on the water, then it proves nothing, but only destroys my conception of water.
2) A very common mistake: To place the aim of life in the service of people and not in the service of God. Only in serving God, i.e., in doing that which He wants, can you be certain that you are not doing something vain and it is not impossible to choose whom you are to serve.
3) Church Christians do not want to serve God, but want God to serve them.
4) Shakespeare began to be valued when the moral criterion was lost.
5) (For The Appeal.) We are so entangled that every one of our steps in life is a participation in evil: in violence, in oppression. We must not despair, but we must slowly disentangle ourselves from those nets in which we are caught; not to tear ourselves through,—that would entangle us worse—but to disentangle ourselves carefully.