If I had written King Lear, I would be plagued by remorse for the rest of my life. For the sheer greatness of this work grossly magnifies its defects, its monstrous defects, the tiniest things that stand between certain scenes and their possible perfection. It’s not the sun marred by spots; it’s a broken Greek statue. All that has ever been done is ridden with errors, faulty perspectives, ignorance, signs of bad taste, shortcomings and oversights. To write a masterpiece large enough to be great and perfect enough to be sublime is a task no one has had the fortune or divine capacity to accomplish. Whatever can’t be done in a single burst suffers from the unevenness of our spirit.

This thought causes my imagination to be overwhelmed by regret, by a painful certainty that I’ll never be able to do anything good and useful for Beauty. The only method for achieving Perfection is to be God. Our greatest effort takes time; the time it takes passes through various stages of our soul, and each stage of the soul, being unlike any other, taints the character of the work with its own personality. All we can be certain of when we write is that we write badly; the only great and perfect works are the ones we never dream of realizing.

Listen still, with a sympathetic ear. Hear me out and then tell me if dreaming isn’t better than life… Hard work never pays off. Effort never leads anywhere. Only abstention is noble and lofty, for it alone recognizes that realization is always inferior, that the work we produce is always the grotesque shadow of the work we dreamed.

How I would love to be able to record, in words on paper that could be read out loud and listened to, the dialogues of the characters in my imagined dramas! The action in these dramas flows perfectly and the dialogues are flawless, but the action isn’t spatially delineated in me such that I could materially project it, nor does the substance of these inner dialogues consist of actual words which I could listen to closely and transcribe on paper.

I love certain lyric poets precisely because they weren’t epic or dramatic poets, because they had the intuitive wisdom never to want to express more than an intensely felt or dreamed moment. What can be written unconsciously is the exact measure of the perfection that is possible. No Shakespearian drama satisfies like a lyric poem of Heine. The poetry of Heine is perfect, whereas all drama – of Shakespeare or anyone else – is inevitably imperfect. Ah, to be able to construct a complete Whole, to compose something that would be like a human body, with perfect harmony among all its parts, and with a life, a life of unity and congruency, uniting the scattered traits of its various parts!*

You who listen but hardly hear me have no idea what a tragedy this is! To lose father and mother, to attain neither glory nor happiness, to have neither friend nor lover – all of that can be endured; what cannot be endured is to dream something beautiful that’s impossible to achieve in word or deed.

The awareness that a work is perfect, the satisfaction of a work achieved… – soothing is the sleep under this shady tree in the calm of summer.