IN SOME rare between-whiles it is as if nothing mattered. My heart aches, I say; my soul wanders; this person or that person was repelled to-day; but nothing matters.
A great inner languor comes like a giant and lays hold of me. I lie fallow beneath it.
Some one forgot me in the giving of things. But it does not matter. I feel nothing.
Persons say to me, don't analyze any more and you will not be unhappy.
When Something throws heavy clubs at you and you are hit by them, don't be hurt. When Something stronger than you holds your hands in the fire, don't let it burn you. When Something pushes you into a river of ice, don't be cold. When something draws a cutting lash across your naked shoulders, don't let it concern you—don't be conscious that it is there.
This is great wisdom and fine, clear logic.
It is a pity that no one has ever yet been able to live by it.
But after all it's no matter. Nothing is any one's affair. It is all of no consequence.
And have I not had all my anguish for nothing? I am a fool—a fool.
A handful of rich black mud in a pig's yard—does it wonder why it is there? Does it torture itself about the other mud around it, and about the earth and water of which it is made, and about the pig? Only fool's mud would do so. And so, then, I am fool's mud.
Nothing counts. Nothing can possibly count.
Regret, passion, cowardice, hope, bravery, unrest, pain, the love-sense, the soul-sense, the beauty-sense—all for nothing! What can a handful of rich black mud in a pig's yard have to do with these? I am a handful of rich black mud—a fool-woman, fool's mud.
All on earth that I need to do is to lie still in the hot sun and feel the pig rolling and floundering and slushing about. It were folly to waste my mud nerves in wondering. Be quiet, fool-woman, let things be. Your soul is a fool's-mud soul and is governed by the pig; your heart is a fool's-mud heart, and wants nothing beyond the pig; your life is a fool's-mud life, and is the pig's life.
Something within me shrieks now, but I do not know what it is—nor why it shrieks.
It groans and moans.
There is no satisfaction in being a fool—no satisfaction at all.