otions and converted the diseases of their souls into outline.

"What fatuous, little cylindrical creatures we humans are! With our
exact and placid surfaces that we call beauty. And these grave and noble
houses we erect!

"Yes, I ought to have been a God. I should have had my way with people
then. I could have created a world whose horrors would have remained a
consoling flattery to my cynicism."

There are entries that follow whose significance is lost in a serpentine
rhetoric. They hint at nights of critical terrors. During the writing of
them Mallare was engaged in a desperate pursuit of himself. He was
escaping. He perceived his thoughts racing from his grasp like Maenads
down a tangled slope. The dread of finding himself abandoned brought his
will into life. If he were to go mad he would leap upon his mania and
ride it--quietly into darkness. He would be a gay rider astride his own
phantoms. Rather that than let the first insane capering of his
intellect unhorse him and leave him gibbering after a vanished mount.

The incoherence of the Journal suddenly glides into an adagio. The panic
has ended. And the lifeless eyed man again smiles triumphant out of the
pages.

"My room is red. It is hung with red curtains. I have bought only red
things to put in it. The sun coming through my red curtains reddens the
air of the room.

"I prefer to live in this painted gloom because it is possible I hate
the sunlight. I hate even my rivals the trees. Today I walked and found
trees that resembled too closely people passing under them. One is
impotent before such betrayal.

"But here in my rooms I find an almost complete annihilation of life. I
am bored with inventing causes for my hatred. There is a diversion on
earth called humanity--creatures full of enamelled lusts and arrogant
decays who go about smiling and slyly obeying laws which protect them
from each other. But they no longer divert me.

"They tell me of health and sanity. And I say sanity is the determined
blindness which keeps us from seeing one another. More than that, of
course: which keeps us from seeing ourselves. And health is the lame
artifice of our bodies which keeps us from loathing one another. I see
and I loathe. Yet I must beware of falling to sleep in explanations."

A month or a year may have passed between this and the continuation.
Whatever the period, a clarity arrived. Mallare's mind grappling with
the nightmare shadows engulfing it, distort