darkness. Ten times a day it seems to me impossible, too horrible,
that death should be the end of everything,--and then again, a dozen
times I feel that such is the case.


23 March.

When I arrived from Ploszow I found my father so much better that it
never even entered my mind that the end could be so near. What strange
twists there are in the human mind. God knows how sincerely I rejoiced
when I found my father so much better than I had thought, and yet
because throughout that anxious journey I had fancied him sick unto
death, and already saw myself kneeling at his coffin, I was sorry
for my wasted anxieties. Now the memory of this fills me with keen
remorse.

How thoroughly unhappy is the individual whose heart and soul have
lost their simplicity. Thus not less bitter, not less of a reproach is
the remembrance that at my father's deathbed there were two persons in
me: one of them the son full of anguish, who gnawed his hands to keep
back his sobs; the other the philosopher, who studied the psychology
of death. I am unutterably unhappy because my nature is an unhappy
one.

My father died with full consciousness. Saturday evening he felt a
little worse. I sent for the doctor, that he might be at hand in case
we should want him. The doctor prescribed some physic, and my father,
according to his habit, disputed the point, demonstrating that the
physic would bring on a stroke. The doctor calmed my fears, and said
though there was always fear of another stroke, he saw no immediate