Love and Other Stories

THREE oclock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I cant sleep, I am so happy!My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange, incomprehensible feeling. I cant analyse it just nowI havent the time, Im too lazy, and therehang analysis! Why, is a man likely to interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost from a belfry, or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand? Is he in a state to do it?This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girl of nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times, and as often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, and copied it all over again. I spent as long over the letter as if it had been a novel I had to write to order. And it was not because I tried to make it longer, more elaborate, and more fervent, but because I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing, ...