These men, with their eternal jobs—and their eternal mills of God that keep on grinding at nothing!
It is too boring, just boring.
However did I come to take him seriously at all!
'At least in Dresden, one will have one's back to it all.
And there will be amusing things to do.
It will be amusing to go to these eurythmic displays, and the German opera, the German theatre.
It WILL be amusing to take part in German Bohemian life.
And Loerke is an artist, he is a free individual.
One will escape from so much, that is the chief thing, escape so much hideous boring repetition of vulgar actions, vulgar phrases, vulgar postures.
I don't delude myself that I shall find an elixir of life in Dresden.
I know I shan't.
But I shall get away from people who have their own homes and their own children and their own acquaintances and their own this and their own that.
I shall be among people who DON'T own things and who HAVEN'T got a home and a domestic servant in the background, who haven't got a standing and a status and a degree and a circle of friends of the same.
Oh God, the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one's head tick like a clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness.
How I HATE life, how I hate it.
How I hate the Geralds, that they can offer one nothing else.
'Shortlands!—Heavens!
Think of living there, one week, then the next, and THEN THE THIRD— 'No, I won't think of it—it is too much.'
And she broke off, really terrified, really unable to bear any more.
The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day following day, AD INFINITUM, was one of the things that made her heart palpitate with a real approach of madness.
The terrible bondage of this tick-tack of time, this twitching of the hands of the clock, this eternal repetition of hours and days—oh God, it was too awful to contemplate.
And there was no escape from it, no escape.
She almost wished Gerald were with her to save her from the terror of her own thoughts.
Oh, how she suffered, lying there alone, confronted by the terrible clock, with its eternal tick-tack.
All life, all life resolved itself into this: tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack; then the striking of the hour; then the tick-tack, tick-tack, and the twitching of the clock-fingers.
Gerald could not save her from it.
He, his body, his motion, his life—it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a horrible mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours.
What were his kisses, his embraces.
She could hear their tick-tack, tick-tack.
Ha—ha—she laughed to herself, so frightened that she was trying to laugh it off—ha—ha, how maddening it was, to be sure, to be sure!
Then, with a fleeting self-conscious motion, she wondered if she would be very much surprised, on rising in the morning, to realise that her hair had turned white.
She had FELT it turning white so often, under the intolerable burden of her thoughts, und her sensations.
Yet there it remained, brown as ever, and there she was herself, looking a picture of health.
Perhaps she was healthy.
Perhaps it was only her unabateable health that left her so exposed to the truth.
If she were sickly she would have her illusions, imaginations.
As it was, there was no escape.
She must always see and know and never escape.
She could never escape.
There she was, placed before the clock-face of life.
And if she turned round as in a railway station, to look at the bookstall, still she could see, with her very spine, she could see the clock, always the great white clock-face.
In vain she fluttered the leaves of books, or made statuettes in clay.
She knew she was not REALLY reading.
She was not REALLY working.
She was watching the fingers twitch across the eternal, mechanical, monotonous clock-face of time.
She never really lived, she only watched.
Indeed, she was like a little, twelve-hour clock, vis-a-vis with the enormous clock of eternity—there she was, like Dignity and Impudence, or Impudence and Dignity.
The picture pleased her.
Didn't her face really look like a clock dial—rather roundish and often pale, and impassive.
She would have got up to look, in the mirror, but the thought of the sight of her own face, that was like a twelve-hour clock-dial, filled her with such deep terror, that she hastened to think of something else.