I make the last strokes with so much pain, with such a sense of sorrow and hopelessness, as though I were bidding good-bye to the person I loved best of all.

But here I have finished it.

Do you understand what it means?
It means that it has assumed life, that it lives, that there is a certain mysterious spirit in it.

And yet it is already doomed to death, it is dead already, dead like a herring.

Can you understand it at all?
I do not understand it.
And, now, imagine, I--fool that I am--I nevertheless rejoice, I cry and rejoice.