Day 0377

Laboured for four hours on the painting, changing but not improving. Finished listening to Fathers and Sons. Regret doing so little art last year, and being weak enough to think that doing an hour every day was acceptable. It achieved nothing except wear me out! I want finished pieces, and that requires extended time at the easel, not just one hour here and there.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons