The last half-hour, since I wrote these words, has been as miserable a half-hour as I remember spending in my life. And yet there is nothing to account for it, except this absurd sensitiveness which is growing upon me. Why is it that one clings to life when it bores one in this manner? I am not sure that I have ever felt what people call the joy of living: life has always seemed to me a more or less ridiculous compromise; and yet there is nothing I dread so much as any sort of truth, the truth which might put an end, once and for all, to this compromise. Was there ever any one so illogical? I hate life, and yet I want to go on living for ever. Sometimes, coming back at night, after a concert in which some great music has struck one into a profound seriousness, a strange and terrifying sensation takes hold of me as the cab turns suddenly, out of a tangle of streets, into a broad road between trees and houses: one enters into it as into a long dimly lighted alley, and at the end of the road is the sky, with one star hung like a lantern upon the darkness; and it seems as if the sky is at the end of the road, that if one drove right on one would plunge over the edge of the world. All that is solid on the earth seems to melt about one; it is as if one's eyes had been suddenly opened, and one saw for the first time. And the great dread comes over me: the dread of what may be on the other side of reality. And it seems as if all the years of the longest life, measured out into days and hours, would not be long enough to hold me back from the horror of that plunge. * * * * * April 11.--She deceived me: all women deceive. I have no right to condemn her any more than I condemn my doctor for deceiving me when I am ill. He tells me: You will be better to-morrow; knowing that the only way to make me better is to make me think I am going to be so. It would be worse for us if women did not deceive us.