“To read others’ diaries without
permission — the Everest of
baseness” (Unknown aphorism of
the simpleton Wilson).
18.IX.1962
I am not starting this diary for want of playing at greatness. I need a friend, with whom I can share my doubts. I know of no companion more faithful, more sincere than paper.
The earth is carrying me around the sun for the twenty-eighth year now. I haven’t done much of anything that’s good or beautiful during all this time. Instead, I’ve learned to be silent and cautious when I should scream. And, most horrible of all, — I’ve learned to be insincere.
Lying — perhaps my profession. I was bom with a talent for lying. There are three categories of liars: some lie to have a measure of material or moral comfort from it; others lie just for the sake of lying, and the third group serve lying as an art. It’s they that make up, or dream up, logical extremities for truth. These liars, of all my horde of liars, seem noble to me. They are the “reserves” of literature. Without them it would be boring to live; without them truth itself would become mundane and petty, boring and trivial. Noble lying adds glory to truth.
Steering myself by this, more often than anything else, I fell in with the third type of lie. People like me are also indispensable for literature—with our sickly thoughts we fertilize the soil where a giant is to grow. Some future Taras or Franko.1 I await him like a believer would the coming of Christ. I believe that I will have the luck to hear the joyous Hossana in honor of his arrival. May he only not insult us little journeymen of poetry. He will grow from out of us.
I could be of greater service to literature had nature not endowed me with hearing or sight. I do not see all the
segments of reality, nor hear all the sounds, music is torment for me. I will never even visit that holiday of hues
from which the happy Sarian never returns. I can’t really envy the Sarians and Shostakoviches, for an illiterate
can’t be jealous of Leo Tolstoy.2 He is jealous of his neighbor, who can scratch out a few measly words.
Перекладач: Andriy M. Freishyn-Chirovsky
Оригінал: Окрайці думок (18.09.1962)
Мова: english
