From a letter to Stefan Szuman
Dated 24th July, 1932
That enchantment with solitude itself, the dissociation from life, from action, the delight and tragedy of [your poem] reminds me of a most essential and profound dream that I had when I was seven years old, a dream anticipating my fate. I dreamt that I was in a forest — night-time and darkness — and I cut off my penis with a knife, dug a hole in the ground, and buried it. That is the antecedent, so to speak, of the dream, the part without emotional intonation. The dream continued: I came to my senses, and realised the atrocity, the monstrousness of the sin I had committed. I didn’t want to believe I had committed it, and yet in my desperation it remained apparent that it was indeed so. I had done it, it was indisputable. I was now as if outside time, facing eternity, which for me was nothing other than the terrible awareness of my guilt, a feeling of irreparable loss in the face of all eternity. I was condemned for the ages, and it seemed as if I were locked up like a specimen in a glass jar from which I could never escape. That sense of unending agony, of eternal condemnation, is something I shall never lose. How could I explain at such an age that symbolic burden, the potentiality implied by that dream that remains intact to this day?