I looked at Aniela as she stooped for a handful of soil to throw upon the lowered coffin.  She was paler than usual, and with the sun shining upon her I could read the transparent features as an open book.  I was certain she was thinking of her own death.  To me it seemed simply monstrous, a horrible improbability, that this face so full of expression, so full of life and charming individuality, should at some time be stony white and remain in eternal darkness.

And as if a sudden frost had nipped all my thoughts, I grew suddenly conscious that the first ceremony I assisted at with Aniela was a funeral.  As a person in long sickness, having lost faith in medicine, turns to quack doctors and wise women, so the sick soul, doubting everything, still clings to certain superstitions.

Probably no one is so near the gulf of mysticism as the absolute sceptic.  Those who have lost faith in religious and sociological ideals, those whose belief in the power of science and the human intellect is shaken, that whole mass of highly cultured people, uncertain of their way, deprived of all dogmas, hopelessly struggling in the dark, drift more and more towards mysticism.  It seems to spring up everywhere,—­the usual reaction of a society whose life is based upon positivism, the overthrow of ideals, empty pleasures, and soulless striving after gain.  The human spirit begins to burst its shell, which is too narrow, too much like a stock exchange.  One epoch draws to an end, and then appears a simultaneous evolution in all directions.  It has struck me often with amazement that, for instance, the more recent great writers seem not to know how very close upon mysticism they are.  Some of them are conscious of it, and confess so openly.  In every book I opened lately, I found, not the human soul, will, and personal passions, but merely fatal forces with all the characteristics of terrible beings, independent of personal manifestations, living alone within themselves, like Goethe’s “Mother.”

As regards myself, I too come near the brink.  I see it and am not afraid.  The abyss attracts; personally it attracts me so much that if I could I would go to the very bottom, and will some time when I am able.

28 April.

I intoxicate myself with the life at Ploszow, the daily sight of Aniela, and forget that she belongs to somebody else.  Kromitzki, who is somewhere at Baku, or further still, appears to me as something unreal, a being deprived of real existence, something bad that might come down upon us, as for instance, death, but of which one does not think continually.  But yesterday something happened to bring him before my mind.  It was a small and apparently most natural incident.  Aniela received at breakfast two letters.  My aunt asked whether they were from her husband, and she replied, “Yes.”  Hearing that, I felt the sensation a condemned man may feel when they rouse him from a sweet dream in order to tell him to have his hair cut for the guillotine.  I saw my whole misfortune more distinctly than ever before, and the sensation remained with me the whole day, especially as my aunt, quite unconsciously, of course, was bent upon torturing me further.  Aniela wanted to put off the reading of the letters, but my aunt insisted upon her opening them, and presently inquired how Kromitzki was.