How much better were there hatred here than Nothing!
I long hopelessly for will-power, resolution to take my life into my own hands, to walk away from this house some day and never return. I have nowhere to go—no money, and I know the world quite too well to put the slightest faith in its voluntary kindness of heart. But how much better and wider, less damned, less maddening, to go out into it and be beaten and cheated and fooled with, than this!—this thing that gathers itself easily into a circle made of six tooth-brushes with a sufficiency of surplus damnation.
I have read about a woman who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. Perhaps she had a house at Jerusalem with six tooth-brushes and Nothingness. In that case she might have rushed gladly into the arms of thieves.
I think of crimes that strike horror and revulsion to my maid-senses. And I think of my Nothingness, and I ask myself were it not better to walk the earth an outcast, a solitary woman, and meet and face even these, than that each and every one of my woman-senses should wear slowly, painfully to shreds, and strain and break—in this unnameable Nothing?
Oh, the dreariness—the hopelessness of Nothing!
There are no words to tell it. And things are always hardest to bear when there are no words for them.
However great one’s gift of language may be, there is always something that one can not tell.
I am weary of self—always self. But it must be so.