May 2d.
I was crouching out on one of the docks last night. I had no place else to go. I can think anywhere, if it is quiet.
A wonderful thing is the night. I bless Thee for the night, oh “süsse, heilige Natur”!
It was a voice in my soul, as clear as could be.
—She can not bear too long the sight of men, sweet, holy Nature: the swarming hives—the millions of tiny creatures, each drunk and blind with his own selfishness; and so she lays her great hand upon it all, and hides it out of her sight.
Once it was all silent, and formless as the desert; soon it shall all be silent and formless again; and meanwhile—the night, the night!
Oh, I hunger for the desert! I do not care for beauty—I have no time for beauty, I want the earth stern and forbidding. Give me some place where no one else would want to go—an iron crag where the oceans beat—a mountain-top where the lightning splinters on the rocks.
I go at it again. But I am nervous—these things get me into such a state that I simply can not do anything. It was not merely yesterday—I have it constantly. The dirty chambermaid singing, or yelling down to the landlady; the drunken man swearing at his wife; the boys screaming in the street and kicking a tomato-can about. When I think of how much beauty and power has been shattered in my life by such things as these, it brings tears of impotent rage into my eyes.