No matter what I do- what talking, thinking, writing, listening- in the end I feel around me, like an atmosphere, like a background radiation, and within me, a pervasive sense of guilt. Nothing is enough, nothing satisfies this inherent sense of a finger pointing at me, a soon to be felt humiliation, a confrontation with something I have unwittingly exposed. Perhaps the only mild relief I know from this gnawing ache, this unreasonable constant nagging within, this neurotic mind-ache, is to contemplate, at length, the transitory quality of all experience. To see the world from this perspective is to notice more the flow of experience rather than the immediate manifestations of human thought, feeling or interaction. To write- ah, freedom for a few moments from this weight- and even that- too often too fleeting.
(8/3/86) (for David Hess, 2/25/03)