2
date 6-15-1914
(Copy of a letter sent to Pretoria)
I have been in good health, and my spirit, curiously enough, has been less ill disposed. Even so, I am tortured by a vague nervousness that I can only call an intellectual itch, as if I were getting a rash on my soul. It's only in this absurd style that I can describe what I'm feeling. All this, however, is unrelated to those sad moods I've spoken of before, when I'm sad for no reason. My current mood is caused by something.

Everything around me is disappearing and falling apart. I don't use these two verbs in their sad sense. I merely mean that the people I deal with every day are moving out, ending periods in their lives, and all that - as if I were an old man who sees all the friends of his childhood dying around him and who thinks his own death is at hand - mysteriously suggests to me that my life should move along and change as well. Notice that I don't think this change is going to be for the worse; just the opposite. But it is a change, and for me change, passing from one thing to another, is a partial death. A part of us dies, and our sadness about its dying or passing away cannot but touch our hearts.

Look: Tomorrow my best, my most intimate friend is going to Paris to stay. Aunt Anica (take a look at her letter) in all likelihood is soon going off to Switzerland with her daughter, who's married now. Another one is going to Galicia for a long time. My second-best friend is moving to Porto. So in my human environment everything is organizing (or disorganizing) itself to drift away, and I don't know if it's to isolate me or to lead me to another path I cannot yet see. Even the fact that I am going to publish a book is going to change my life. I am losing something - being unpublished. And so changing for the better, because change is bad, is always changing for the worse. And losing a defect or a deficiency or a negation is always losing something. Imagine Mother not living with her painful, daily feelings, a creature who is so sensitive!

What will I be ten years from now - or even five fears from now? My friends tell me that I'll be one of the greatest contemporary poets - they say it seeing what I've already done, not what I might do (in which case I would not have quoted them). But do I know for sure what that, should it happen, might mean? Do I know what this smells of? Perhaps glory tastes of death and uselessness, and triumph smells of rot.