Amiel's Journal

Useless and incessant struggle is a humiliation to one’s manhood. The lion finds the gnat the most intolerable of his foes. The natural man feels the same. But the spiritual man must learn the lesson of gentleness and long-suffering. The inevitable is the will of God. We might have preferred something else, but it is our business to accept the lot assigned us.... One thing only is necessary—

  “Garde en mon coeur la foi dans ta volonté sainte,  Et de moi fais, ô Dieu, tout ce que tu voudras.”

Later.—One of my students has just brought me a sympathetic message from my class. My sister sends me a pot of azaleas, rich in flowers and buds;–sends roses and violets: every one spoils me, which proves that I am ill.

March 19, 1881.—Distaste—discouragement. My heart is growing cold. And yet what affectionate care, what tenderness, surrounds me!… But without health, what can one do with all the rest? What is the good of it all to me? What was the good of Job’s trials? They ripened his patience; they exercised his submission.

Come, let me forget myself, let me shake off this melancholy, this weariness. Let me think, not of all that is lost, but of all that I might still lose. I will reckon up my privileges; I will try to be worthy of my blessings.

March 21, 1881.—This invalid life is too Epicurean. For five or six weeks now I have done nothing else but wait, nurse myself, and amuse myself, and how weary one gets of it! What I want is work. It is work which gives flavor to life. Mere existence without object and without effort is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor, and languor to disgust. Besides, here is the spring again, the season of vague desires, of dull discomforts, of dim aspirations, of sighs without a cause. We dream wide-awake. We search darkly for we know not what; invoking the while something which has no name, unless it be happiness or death.

March 28, 1881.—I cannot work; I find it difficult to exist. One may be glad to let one’s friends spoil one for a few months; it is an experience which is good for us all; but afterward? How much better to make room for the living, the active, the productive.

  “Tircis, voici le temps de prendre sa retraite.”

Is it that I care so much to go on living? I think not. It is health that I long for—freedom from suffering.

And this desire being vain, I can find no savor in anything else. Satiety. Lassitude. Renunciation. Abdication. “In your patience possess ye your souls.”

April 10, 1881. (Sunday).—Visit to –. She read over to me letters of 1844 to 1845—letters of mine. So much promise to end in so meager a result! What creatures we are! I shall end like the Rhine, lost among the sands, and the hour is close by when my thread of water will have disappeared.

Afterward I had a little walk in the sunset. There was an effect of scattered rays and stormy clouds; a green haze envelops all the trees—

  “Et tout renaît, et déjà l’aubépine  A vu l’abeille accourir à ses fleurs,”—but to me it all seems strange already.

Later.—What dupes we are of our own desires!… Destiny has two ways of crushing us—by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them. But he who only wills what God wills escapes both catastrophes. “All things work together for his good.”

April 14, 1881.—Frightful night; the fourteenth running, in which I have been consumed by sleeplessness....

April 15, 1881.—To-morrow is Good Friday, the festival of pain. I know what it is to spend days of anguish and nights of agony. Let me bear my cross humbly.... I have no more future. My duty is to satisfy the claims of the present, and to leave everything in order. Let me try to end well, seeing that to undertake and even to continue, are closed to me.

April 19, 1881.—A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart fail me.

  “Que vivre est difficile, ô mon coeur fatigué!”