My Struggle: Book 1

Hope lay in the next time I would see her. In the midst of this spiritual storm spring arrived. Few things are harder to visualize than that a cold, snow-bound landscape, so marrow chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees

shrugged, even though I was all alone, put on my coat and walked to the bus, through a landscape that lay as if hypnotized beneath the moonlight.

She was attracted to me, I knew that, but she had such strict limits around her and what she felt she could do that there was never a question of us becoming a couple. To be honest, I was not sure that she was actually attracted to me, it might simply have been that she was flattered by all the attention she was receiving, and found it entertaining

It was as though I had been struck by lightning. At regular intervals happiness surged along my nerve channels. My heart trembled, my soul glowed. Suddenly I couldn’t wait for Monday, I couldn’t wait for school to begin.

Even before I awoke I knew that something good had happened. It was like a hand stretching down to me where I lay at the bottom of consciousness, watching one image after another rushing past me. A hand I grabbed and let lift me slowly, I came closer and closer to myself until I thrust open my eyes.

cognoscente. For my own guitar, a cheap Stratocaster

Drinking was good for me; it set things in motion. And I was thrust into something, a feeling of … not infinity exactly, but of, well, something unlimited. Something I could go into, deeper and deeper. The feeling was so sharp and distinct. No bounds. That was what it was, a feeling of boundlessness. So I was full of anticipation.

clothes that were as provocative as they were vulgar and smelled of smoke, the one whose gums were visible every time she smiled, attractive apart from that, but her laughter, a kind of constant giggle that accompanied everything she said, and all the stupid things she came out with, and the fact that she had a slight lisp, detracted from her beaut

Someone knew someone who had a flat, someone knew someone who could buy beer for us, and so I sat there drinking in an unfamiliar living room one summer afternoon, and it was like an explosion of happiness, nothing held any danger or fear anymore, I just laughed and laughed, and in the midst of all this, the unfamiliar furniture, the unfamiliar gir