Roses Supposes

“I feel as I were disintegrating and ‘growing up,’ whatever that means, simultaneously, and that there is a race or bloody grappling going on between the two in my head and solar plexus. I would like to learn how to be relieved of such pain and poison as is not necessary, and how to stand that which is inevitable. I trust much but not enough in psychoanalysis, which I could not afford even if I believe in it fully enough to subject myself to it. I trust nothing else save a feeling of God, and love, and in part myself, but here too I know my ignorance is such that I am handling and eating medicines and poisons blindfold and indiscriminate. It seems to me very dangerous to be alive save through denials of the main point of living, the effort to understand such as you can, and to live and work accordingly. I could mainly care for innocence and devotion, but that is qualified when you see innocence eat its own death and ruin and devote al its life and fierceness to it.”

[...]

“Did you read of the young man on the hotel ledge in New York? Who went out there desiring to be alone from a room of female relatives? He stayed there eleven hours, with the room occupied on one side and the whole city gawping up from below him, and between these pressures, from which apparently none thought twice of relieving him, he finally jumped. A man who stands on a ledge eleven hours and drinks coffee does not want to die. I think the situation is a perfecting into literal symbolism of a routine which is suffered by every young man who will not capitulate: he capitulates all the same in madness or in death; or just very occasionally through craft, talent or cruelty, bursts the trap: but if so, its marks on him, forever.”