These riches prevented me from doing anything, and I have no fixed aim in life.  It might be different had I been born an Englishman or a German, and not been handicapped by that improductivite Slave.  No one of the compound active principles of civilization attracts me or fills up the void, for the simple reason that civilization is faint and permeated with scepticism.  If it feels its end is drawing near and doubts itself, why should I believe in it and devote to it my life?  Generally speaking, I live as if in mid air, with no firm hold upon the earth.  If my disposition were cold and dry, if I were dull of mind or merely sensuous, I could have limited my life to mere vegetation or animal enjoyment.  But it happened otherwise.  I brought with me into the world a bright intellect, a luxuriant organism, and vital powers of no mean degree.  These forces had to find an outlet, and they could find it only in the love for a woman.  There remained nothing else for me.  My whole misfortune is that, as a child of a diseased civilization, I grew up crooked; therefore love, too, came to me crooked.

Simplicity of mind would have given me happiness, but what is the use to speak of it?  The hunchback, too, would be glad to get rid of his hump, but he cannot, because hump-backed he came from his mother’s womb.  My hump was caused by the abnormal state of civilization that brought me into the world.  But straight or crooked, I must love, and I will.

4 May.

My reason is now altogether subservient to feeling, and is, in truth, like the driver who passively clings to his box, and can do nothing but watch whether the vehicle will go to pieces.  I went back to Ploszow a few days ago, and all I say and all I do are only the tactics of love.  He is a clever doctor—­is Chwastowski—­to prescribe for Aniela exercise in the park.  I found her there this morning.  There are moments when the feeling in my heart—­though I am always conscious of it—­manifests itself with such extraordinary power that it almost frightens me by its magnitude.  Such a moment I had to-day, when at a sudden turn of the road I met Aniela.  Never had she appeared to me more beautiful, more desirable, and more as if she were my own.  This is exactly the only woman in the world who by virtue of certain natural forces, scarcely known by name, was to attract me, as the magnet attracts iron, to reign over me, to attach me to her, and become the aim and completion of my life.  Her voice, her shape, her glances intoxicate me.  To-day, when I thus unexpectedly met her, I thought it was not only her personal charm she carried with her, but the charm of that early morning, that spring and serene weather, the joy of all the birds and plants,—­in fact, she seemed to be more an incarnation of beauty and nature than a woman.  And it struck me then that, if nature had created her thus that she should react upon me more than upon any other man, nature had meant her to be mine, and that my right had been trodden under foot by this marriage.  Who knows whether all the crookedness of the world does not spring from the non-fulfilment of certain laws, and whether that be not the cause of the imperfectness of life?