These evenings are no-times, not day and not night. […] I don’t quite know myself any longer. I forget how to smile… how to squeeze words out of my mouth. Everything drains away. Nothing is left but an empty world. […] There is nothing in life anymore. I try to find the way out but people prevent me. Utterly heartless, they want to force upon me an unendurable existence, not seeing that I have already left their world. […] I can never got back to the living world unless I am changed completely, not only in essence, but in outer aspect, transformed throughout the entire complex of body, brain, intellect, memory, feeling, the sum of total of which is the individual being.


A summer evening, in My Soul in China, 191.