There occur in life such terrible incidents that the mind refuses to retain the memory of them for a moment, but the impression remains and becomes irresistibly alive again.

The glass of absinthe at six o’clock, and the terrace of the Brewery of Lilas behind the statue of Marshal Ney, are my only remaining sin and delight. There, after finishing the day’s work, when soul and body are exhausted, I refresh myself with the green drink, a cigarette, the Temps, and the Débuts. How sweet is life after all, when the mist of a mild intoxication casts its veil over the miseries of existence.

I repeat that I have never been plagued by visions, but actual objects sometimes seem to me to assume a human shape in a grandiose style. Thus, one day the cushion which my head has been pressing during a midday siesta, looks like a marble head carved in the style of Michelangelo. One evening when I return home in the company of the “double” of the American empiric doctor, I discover, in the half-shadow of the alcove where my bed is, what looks like a gigantic Zeus reposing on it. Before this unexpected sight my friend remains seized with an almost religious fear. His artistic eye comprehends at once the beauty of the outline. “There is a great forgotten art,” he says, “born again! That is where we ought to learn drawing!” The more one looks at it, the more lifelike and terrible it appears. Obviously, the spirits have become realists like the rest of us mortals. It is no mere accident, for on certain days the cushion takes the shape of terrible monsters, such as Gothic dragons and serpents; and one night after I have spent a hilarious evening, I am greeted on my return by a medieval demon, a devil with horned head and other appurtenances.

He had learned to regard suffering as the only real joy in life, and so had attained to resignation.

“How would you explain this phenomenon?” he asks. “Explain? Has one ever explained anything by replacing one heap of words with another heap of words?”

A zinc bath in which I make experiments in alchemy shows on its inner sides a landscape formed by the evaporation of iron salts. I understand it is a presage, but I cannot guess where this landscape is. Hills covered with forests of firs; lying between them, plains covered with fruit trees and cornfields; everything indicates the neighbourhood of a river. One of the hills with precipices of stratified formation is crowned with the ruins of a stately castle. I cannot make out more, but I shall not remain long in uncertainty.

It was ten years before this time, during the most stormy period of my literary life, when I was raging against the feminist movement, which, with the exception of myself, everyone in Scandinavia supported.

The perusal of the delightful book La joie de mourir arouses in me the wish to quit the world. In order to learn to know the boundary between life and death, I lie on the bed, uncork the flask containing cyanide of potassium, and let its poisonous perfume stream out. The man with the scythe approaches softly and voluptuously, but at the last moment someone enters or something else happens; either an attendant enters under some pretext, or a wasp flies in through the window. The powers deny me the only joy left, and I bow to their will.

Beginning with stones, I proceed to the vegetable and animal kingdoms, till I come to man, and behind man I discover the Creator—the great Artist who develops as he creates, sets on fool designs which He rejects later on, resumes plans which have failed, and completes and multiplies primitive forms endlessly. All is the work of His hand. Often in the discovery of methods He makes enormous leaps, and then Science comes and ascertains the extent of the gaps and the missing links, and imagines that it has found the intermediary forms which have disappeared.

The summing up of my reckoning with life is as follows: If I have sinned, on my word of honour, I have been sufficiently punished. That is certain.

In the whole of this cloister, with its countless rooms, there lives only one person, the director of the district hospital. He is a widower, solitary and independent, and from the hard discipline of life has derived that strong and noble contempt of men which leads to a deep knowledge of the vanity of all things, oneself included.

The fire of hell is the wish to rise in the world; the powers awaken this wish and allow the damned souls to get all they want. But as soon as the goal is reached, and the wish is fulfilled, everything is seen to be worthless and the victory is null and void. Oh, vanity of vanities! Then, after the first disappointment, the powers rekindle the flame of ambition and desire; and satisfied greed and satiety are still a worse torment than unquenched appetite. Thus the Devil suffers everlasting punishment, for he gets all he wants at once, so that he cannot enjoy it.

When I go over my past, my childhood already appears to me like a prison house or torture chamber. In order to explain the sufferings inflicted upon innocent children, one has only to suppose an earlier existence, out of which we have been cast down in order to bear the consequences of forgotten sins.

Smiling at death! How could that be possible, were not life essentially comic. Such a fuss about nothing! Perhaps in the depth of our souls there lurks a shadowy consciousness that everything down here is all humbug, a masquerade, a mere pretence, and that all our sufferings afford mirth to the gods.

Have you had that roaring in your ears which is like the noise of a waterwheel? Have you in the solitude of night or in broad daylight observed how memories of the past stir and arise, singly or in groups? Memories of all your faults, crimes, and follies which make your ears tingle, your brows perspire, your spine shudder? You relive your life from your birth to the present day, you suffer over again all the sorrows you have endured; you empty again all the cups which you have drunk to the dregs so often; you crucify your skeleton when there is no more flesh left to crucify; you consume your soul when your heart is reduced to ashes! You know all that? Those are the “mills of God” which grind slowly but exceeding small. You are ground to powder, and think it is over. But no! You are brought again to the mill. Be thankful! That is hell upon earth, as Luther knew it, and reckoned it a special grace to be pulverised on this side of the grave. Think yourself happy and be thankful!