If what is called living is to be always on one's legs, to answer twenty people at once, to go up and down stairs, not to think for a minute during the day, I have never lived so hard as I have this week; and yet _I_ do not take so much part in this constant movement as you might think.--The excitement extends a very short distance below the surface, and a few fathoms down you would find dead water, without any current; life does not penetrate me so easily as that; indeed, at such times I am least alive, although I seem to act and to mingle in what is going on; action stupefies and tires me to an inconceivable degree;--when I am not acting, I am thinking or dreaming, and that is one manner of living;--I have it no longer since I have laid aside my porcelain-image repose. Thus far I have done nothing, and I doubt if I ever shall do anything. I do not know how to stop my brain, therein lies all the difference between a man of talent and a man of genius; there is a constant effervescence, wave pushing wave; I cannot master this sort of waterspout that rises from my heart to my head, and drowns all my thoughts because they have no means of exit.--I can produce nothing, not from sterility but from superabundance; my ideas sprout in such dense, serried masses that they choke one another and cannot ripen.--However swift and impetuous the execution, it can never attain such velocity:--when I write a sentence the thought that it expresses is already as far from me as if a century had passed instead of a second, and it often happens, in spite of myself, that some part of the thought that succeeded it in my brain is mingled with it. That is why I cannot live,--either as poet or as lover.--I can express only the ideas that I no longer have;--I have women only when I have forgotten them and love others;--how can I, a man, make my will known, when, however much I hasten, I no longer feel what I am doing and act only in accordance with a faint memory. To take a thought from some one of my brain-cells, in the rough, like a block of marble just from the quarry, to place it before me, and from morning to night, a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, hew and pound and chip, and carry away a pinch of dust at night to dry my writing,--that is what I never shall be able to do. I can distinguish clearly enough in my mind the slender figure from the unhewn block, and I have a very distinct idea of it; but there are so many angles to smooth, so many protuberances to hew away, so many blows of rasp and hammer to be given to approximate the shape and catch the true curve of the outline, that my hands blister and the chisel drops to the ground.