To-day my father wrote to my aunt, setting her mind at rest as to his health, and I added a postscript from myself, sending kind regards to Aniela and her mother.  I could not say much in a few lines, but I might have promised them a longer letter.  Such a promise would have comforted Aniela and the elder ladies.  I did not do it because I could not.  To-day my spirits are at a very low ebb.  My wish for another life, and my trust in the future have retreated into the farthest distance; I can see them no more, see only the barren, sandy wilderness.  I cannot get rid of the idea that I can only marry Aniela if I can conscientiously believe that our union would lead to mutual happiness.  I cannot represent it otherwise to Aniela without uttering a lie; for I have none of that belief, and instead of it an utter hopelessness almost a dislike of life.  She is ill at ease with longing and uncertainty, but I am worse, all the more so because I love her.

11 March.

Mrs. Davis, to whom, during our causerie on the moonlit terrace, I unfolded my view as to the all-powerfulness of love, more or less as I have written it down, called me Anacreon, and advised me to crown my head with vine leaves, and then said more soberly, “If such be your opinions, why play the part of pessimist?  Belief in such a deity ought to make any man happy.”

Why?  I did not tell her, but I know why.  Love conquers death, but saves from it only the species.  What matters it to me that the species be preserved, when I, the individual, am sentenced to a merciless, unavoidable death?  Is it not rather a refined cruelty that the very affections, which can be felt only by the individual, should serve the future of the species only?  To feel the throbbing of an eternal power, and yet to die,—­that is the height of misery.  In reality there exists only the individual; the species is an abstract idea, and in comparison to the individual, an utter Nirvana.  I understand the love for a son, a grandson, a great grandson,—­for the individual, in fact, that is sentenced to perish,—­but to profess love for one’s species one needs be insincere, or a fanatical sectarian.  I can understand now how centuries after Empedocles there came Schopenhauer and Hartmann.

My brain feels as sore as the back of the laborer who carries burdens beyond his strength.  But the laborer stooping to his work earns his daily bread and is at peace.

I still seem to hear Sniatynski’s words:  “Do not philosophize her away, as you have philosophized away your abilities and your thirty-five years of life.”  I know it leads to nothing, I know it is wrong, but I do not know how not to think.

13 March.

My father died this morning.  He was ill only a few hours.

PELI, VILLA LAURA, 22 March.