3 April.
Alas! that indifference I compared to pure water without taste or
color is only apparently colorless. Looking more closely I perceive
tiny bubbles which dim its purity. They are my idiosyncrasies.
Everything else has left me and they remained. I do not love anybody,
have no active hatred towards any one, but am full of aversions in
regard to various people. One of these is Kromitzki. I do not hate him
because he has taken Aniela from me; I dislike him for his long, flat
feet, his thick knees, lank figure, and that voice like a coffee-mill.
He was always repulsive to me, and I mention the fact now because that
aversion has such a strange vitality in me. I cannot help thinking of
people who jar upon my nerves. If only Kromitzki and Pani Celina came
under that category, I might think those antipathies were hatred in
the disguise of aversion. But it is not so. There are others who have
roused at some time or other an aversion in me that clings quite as
perversely to my memory. As I cannot ascribe it to the state of my
health,--I never felt better in my life,--I explain it in this way:
The world has robbed me of my love, time has dried up hatred, and as
the living individual must feel something, I live upon what remains to
me. I must also say that he who feels and lives thus does not get a
surfeit of happiness.
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