Nothing is consistent, nothing is fixed or certain, in my life. By turns I resemble and differ; there is no living creature so foreign to me that I cannot be sure of approaching. I do not yet know, at the age of thirty-six, whether I am miserly or prodigal, temperate or greedy . . . or rather, being suddenly carried from one to the other extreme, in this very balancing I feel that my fate is being carried out. Why should I attempt to form, by artificially imitating myself, the artificial unity of my life? Only in movement can I find my equilibrium.

Through my heredity, which interbreeds in me two very different systems of life, can be explained this complexity and these contradictions from which I suffer.

Too much novelty dazzles us; we can appreciate in others only what we are able to recognize (just as the Barbarians could only make out in the words we spoke only the letters they were accustomed to pronouncing); as for the rest, we do not even hear it. The artists with the most genius are understood only after their savor has ceased to be rare; the new values they brought, not being in circulation, were not quoted on the market. If you praise so much my article on Wilde (I mean the last one), this is just because I say nothing new in it. My second regular chronicle (of this year) on the other hand awoke no echoes anywhere; the unaccustomed truths I put into it could have been assimilated only if they had been watered down with pages of common-places.

Would it not be possible to write a whole volume (and a successful one) on this subject, historically developing this argument that I merely suggest there:

A race as mixed as ours recognizes through their expression the elements that make it up. By an easy imitation, what it first expresses is what has already been expressed in a preceding period. Who dares to assert that the Latin elements are the strongest in our race—and not simply the most articulate, for very obvious reasons? What has not yet been expressed is no less important because it is less precocious. It is merely harder to invent than to imitate. We strengthen ourselves with the past; but where does that get us? Barrès is one such: leaning heavily as against a wall; motionless.

You cannot imagine an author so great that his most banal qualities are not the first to be appreciated. The crowd always enters by way of the “commons”—and most often never gets beyond them.

Impose upon me the most arbitrary discipline and today I shall say it is wisdom; if I cling to some belief that my reason mocks, this is because I hope to find in it some power against myself.

Today the big pine opposite the cedar is being cut down. Three men worked at it all day. This evening the desperate silhouette of its huge branchless trunk rises like a nightmare against the wonderful pure sky.