Nelka | Page 6

don't see why everyone by inhabiting tropical climes couldn't dispense with clothes and even the lazy could find food where the vegetation is luxuriant. I think it is artificial to live in a place where one's own skin is not sufficient protection against the weather. I think the whole organization of everything is abominable and I don't believe it is a necessary stage of development. Most ordinary lives are the quintessence of artificiality and the grossest waste of time. I am more than ever against the 'me' in myself. It is the source of all evil."
Paris 1900.
"I have read some illuminating bits and I think I will finish by finally building myself a scant but solid creed for I have cast all preconceived notions from me, rooted out all expressions of habit and influence, and cleared, though perhaps still warped dwelling of my former tentative suppositions will contain henceforth but the jewels of certain convictions, or remain empty evermore!"
Paris 1900.
"The stimulating effect of this place is wonderful. I don't know what it is, but it is just life to everything in one. I have absolute peace of mind and I have no mental worries or torments. Nothing seems complicated, nothing seems involved and everything that I can help is satisfactory. I want to lose myself in my work and I have every advantage for doing so. Paris is wonderful, I never so appreciated it before."
"I am so busy, I have my whole week planned ahead for almost every second. You see I am at the studio every morning including Saturday and have several lessons a week in the afternoon. New Years I dined at the La Beaumes. There was just the immediate family and we were twenty-three at table." (These were part of a French branch of the relatives of Nelka on her mother's side.)
Paris 1900.
"I can understand people with no sentiment, but I will not tolerate people who scoff at it."
"I am so glad to have the Russian church here. I go every Sunday."
Paris 1900.
"I don't have a minute to spare. This is what I wanted and the life though very full is easy and tranquil. The free reality of thought is delightful and wonderful. I do not include freedom of expression. I wonder how much I fool myself? It is not an intolerance which wishes to promote self but which is limited and dead to a variation of its own species because it lacks the consciousness of its own incompleteness. A man who does not wish to dominate and emphasize his will upon his surroundings, including people, is not a whole man. My Russian is getting on. I will be very glad when I have mastered the language, then I am going to begin Italian."
As a child Nelka did not speak Russian and only started studying it when grown up. When she later went to Russia she still was very weak in the language and only gradually picked it up with practice, but eventually knew it very well.
Paris 1900.
"How madly busy all the little people are, bussing over the planet, and for what? How nice it is to go to sleep. I am going to bed. P.S. I think it is an intellectual crime to wear long skirts in the streets."
Paris 1900.
"One must be earnest or else laugh at everything and end in despair. I am so satisfied with my present condition that I think it would be foolish to upset it all after so short a time. I am just beginning to feel the peaceful reaction of it all and I dread the idea of getting roused again before having fully got hold of myself. The total change I felt necessary proved a salvation and that complete absence of all reminders of the past year is the only thing wherein I can get quiet. I do not want to go over what I have felt. Suffice it to say that I want to stay just as I am until after next winter when I will feel like going back to America without regret. I do not feel equal to any more emotions."
Paris 1900.
"I do not understand the 'variety of perfection.' I think it is impossible and therefore absurd to try to preface for this life, well up on our own inheritance, as you say. There has been too much practical research and study and not enough character building, the result: total lack of balance and maniacs. Anything better that would admit of more possibility of collectedness of peaceful contemplation of the possibility of perfecting the least act with the whole of oneself. The least act is worth it. How does one live now? Scattered over the universe, over the time. There are no whole people except a few who keep their entirety within the arbitrary limitations of