October 25th.
I read that over just now. Yes, it is this that I dread. I dread the habit of not striving! When that becomes my habit it is my death! And here I sit, day by day—doing just the thing I dread! “Let me go now!” something shouts in me. “Now—or I shall never go at all!”
Oh, if I could find some word to tell men the terror of that thought!
—It is my life—that is what it is! To obey this thing within me, to save this thing within me, to find this thing within me—that is my life!
It is a demon thing—it is a thing that has lifted me up by the hair of my head and shaken me—that has glared at me with the wild eyes of a beast—that has beaten me like a storm of wind and struck me down upon the ground! It shakes me now—it shakes me all the time—it makes me scream with pain—incoherently, frantically. “Oh save me!—Spare me!—Let me go!”
I rave, you say—yes, I know. That is because I can not say what I feel. But what matters it?
Sometimes I say to myself, “I put all that in The Captive, and men have not heard it! And now, what can I do that they will hear—shall I have to go out in the streets and scream? Or what other desperate thing is there?”