i write to believe.

Give sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.  But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow and instead reserve the most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge--from which new sorrows will be born for others--then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply.  And if you have given sorrow the space its gentle origins demand, then you may truly say:  life is beautiful and so rich.  So beautiful and so rich that it makes you want to believe in God. - Etty Hillesum

People complain about how dark it is in the mornings.  But this is often the best time of my day when the dawn peers gray and silent into my pale windows.  Then my bright little table lamp becomes a blazing spotlight and floods over the big black shadow of my desk.  Last week it really felt marvelous.  I sat engrossed in The Idiot, solemnly translated a few lines, wrote them down in an exercise book, made notes and suddenly it was ten o'clock.  Then I felt: Yes that's how you should always work, so deeply immersed that you forget the time.  This morning I am wonderfully peaceful.  Just like a storm that has spent itself.  I have noticed that this always happens following days of intense inner striving after clarity, birth pangs with sentences and thoughts that refuse to be born and make tremendous demands on you.  Then suddenly it drops away, all of it, and a benevolent tiredness enters the brain, then everything feels calm again, then I am ...

Sunday March 9, 1941.  Here goes then.  This is a painful and well-nigh insuperable step for me: yielding up so much that has been suppressed to a blank sheet of lined paper.  The thoughts in my head are sometimes so clear and so sharp and my feelings so deep, but writing them comes hard.  The main difficulty, I think, is a sense of shame.  So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me, and yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give my life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose.   It is like the final, liberating scream that always sticks bashfully in your throat when you make love.  Love does indeed suit me to perfection, and yet it remains a mere trifle, set apart from what is truly essential, and deep inside me something is still locked away.  The rest of me is like that too.  I am blessed enough intellectually to be able to fathom most subjects, to express myself clearly on most things; I s...