It is burlesque, but it is none the less tragedy. It is tragedy that eats its way inward. It is only I and the sand and barrenness. I have never a tender thing in my life. The sand and barrenness has never a grass-blade. I want a human being to love me. I have need of it. I am starving to death for lack of it. Bitterest salt tears surge upward--sobs are shaking themselves out from the depths. Oh, the salt is bitter. I might lay me down and weep all day and all night--and the salt would grow more bitter and more bitter. But life in its Nothingness is more bitter still. It is burlesque-tragedy that is the most tragic of all. It is an inward dying that never ends. It is the bitterness of death added to the bitterness of life. What hell is there like that of one weak little human being placed on the earth--and left _alone_? There are people who live and enjoy. But my soul and I--we find life too bitter, and too heavy to carry alone. Too bitter, and too heavy. Oh, that I and my soul might perish at this moment, forever! April 13. I am sitting writing out on my sand and barrenness. The sky is pale and faded now in the west, but a few minutes ago there was the same old-time, always-new miracle of roses and gold, and glints and gleams of silver and green, and a river in vermilions and purples--and lastly the dear, the beautiful: the red, red line. There also are heavy black shadows. I have given my heart into the keeping of this. And still, as always, I look at it--and feel it all with thrilling passion--and await the Devil’s coming. L’ENVOI: October 28, 1901. And so there you have my Portrayal. It is the record of three months of Nothingness. Those three months are very like the three months that preceded them, to be sure, and the three that followed them--and like all the months that have come and gone with me, since time was. There is never anything different; nothing ever happens. Now I will send my Portrayal into the wise wide world. It may stop short at the publisher; or it may fall still-born from the press; or it may go farther, indeed, and be its own undoing. That’s as may be. I will send it. What else is there for me, if not this book? And, oh, that some one may understand it! --I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate _feeling_. I feel--everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.-- My Portrayal in its analysis and egotism and bitterness will surely be of interest to some. Whether to that one alone who may understand it; or to some who have themselves been left alone; or to those three whom I, on three dreary days, asked for bread, and who each gave me a stone--and whom I do not forgive (for that is the bitterest thing of all): it may be to all of these.