I Have Increased Power

over knowledge of death. (See also Hemingway’s preoccupation.) My dreamworld and realworld become more and more distinct and apart. I see now that what I sought in X seven years ago was mastery or victimage played out naked in the bed. Renewal of nostalgia for lost air of those days, lost passions … Trouble with me now, no active life in realworld. And Time, as realworld, appearing vile, as Shakespeare says: ruinous, vile, dirty Time. As to knowledge of death: and life itself as without consummation foreseeable in ideal joy or passion (have I exaggerated the terror of catastrophe? reality can be joy or terror— and have I exaggerated the joy?): life as vile, as painful, as wretched (this pessimism which was X’s jewel), as grim, not merely bleak: the grimness of chance. Or as Carl wrote, after bughouse, “How often have I had occasion to see existence display the aectations of a bloodthirsty negro homosexual.”