ELECTRIC

“This is the strangest day of illness of all. I am unaccountably fitful. One minute I spring up with an apparent surfeit of energy and pace about, restlessly reviewing plans and projects in my mind, the next I fall suddenly into a sleep, like a swoon, for five minutes or twenty, my mouth wetting the pillow like a child’s.

                                                                                …

“Another day, and I wake again to a sense of altered consciousness. I feel a savage restlessness, as though there weren’t space enough for me in this existence. In and out of moments I experience pangs, like hunger—feelings red and raw, like things new-born. I feel desperate or on the verge of tears, and at the same time, the quality of perception is so dear that I can’t believe I will be allowed to keep it. Surely it will be snatched away from me, and I will be as I was before.”

SACRILEGE

“I feel scared—like I’ve committed a sacrilege in opening my journal and reading the contents prematurely. I’d said I would wait, and I did, but not long enough. I had only enough distance to evaluate a little of it, and now I feel all the misgivings—the apprehension—of having unlatched a Pandora’s box.

“A short while ago, I felt so electric—an image occurred to me. I felt like I had been a scrap of cord severed from the main line, I’d blocked off so many memories of my past, and that at last, because the break had been mysteriously mended, I was feeling a power surge throughout my contemporary being. But now I fear reprisal, a fall from grace. Perhaps I’ve done it—destroyed the clarity. Sometimes I think I was better off before, for now there is a new dimension to anxiety. That all this may desert me. That’s what reading my journal has done—planted some queasy seed that is burgeoning in my garden.

“’Go to the typewriter and write to save yourself, if you can,’ I tell myself. And why do the images relate before I consciously see that they do? And what in me is writing? Now the tears are coming.”