The only thing is to try again. I only realize the more keenly the utter hopelessness of the easiest way. Self-control, and the thought as I look ahead of giving up things is harder, but the other is impossible. I hesitate to express myself so confidently as to my ability to be a superman and a genius, but I can still fight on for a time at least. The end is not yet. What it will be I don’t know. The depths have been deep and the heights might have been higher, but there is a fair middle course possible and I’ll try to do my best. At twenty-three I have to go back to the self-consciousness of youth before I can cast it all off and face life as it is. I often realize the apparent priggishness and silliness of this diary, but I at least try to be sincere sometimes, and after the shocks of the realization of life I may write as a man. Things cannot go on as they have been doing. Circumstances will force me to sink or swim, either to rise from this slough and weakness or collapse utterly, and this knowledge will help me. I may be silent for a long time now, because I am about to cast off my romantic youth and be a man, and the break will appear more sudden than it is. Up to now this diary does not show the vast progress towards disillusioned manhood I have taken. In reality they are so big that I have at times bridged the gulf and said, “All is illusion.” I have felt the utter pettiness of this struggle and seen things from the impersonal and even transcendental viewpoint. The difficulty is, after making the jump, to come back to where I left off and take up the daily struggle. It is hard after realizing that finally one will say, “All is illusion, whether it be worldly success--money and honor, or artistic success and the personal satisfaction of work well done.” However, I must come back in order to live at all, and if I find it too much and after repeated attempts some day give it up as hopeless, then it will be necessary to take the jump at once from youth to death and leave out what comes in between. =New York, September 27, 1913.= Suicide again presenting itself as the only way out, I was prompted to read over my diaries. As a result my sense of humor caused me to destroy the first one, dating from 1905, my fifteenth year. Full of childish struggles and events, at least until my eighteenth year, I could not let it live after my death. After my eighteenth year in New York, I began to face reality, but yet I could not allow even that part of the record to survive. True, from my fifteenth year I have been in a bad way, but until several years ago a solution seemed bound to come. Suicide never entered my thoughts in those days. Sex worried me, however, from fourteenth or fifteenth year. Mentally, only until my twentieth, but thinking without acting didn’t strengthen me. However as this is a sort of last testament I must not waste time on those days. I hardly know how to begin and what to say, but something seems necessary.