Feb. 3 1904

Dear Joe: How life & the world—the past & the future —are looking—to me? As they have been looking to me the last 7 years: as being NON-EXISTENT. That is, that there is nothing. That there is no God and no universe; that there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that insane Thought. Yr friend,

Mark Twain