The Journal of a Disappointed Man quotes

The journal begins when its author is a little over thirteen years old. The following are selected entries.

Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing on “How Cats Spend their Time.”

Went with L⸺ out catapult shooting. While walking down the main road saw a Goldfinch, but very indistinctly—it might not have been one. Had some wonderful shots at a tree creeper in the hedge about a foot away from me.

I shall have to get blowpipes and egg drills. Spring has really arrived and even the grasshoppers are beginning to stridulate, yet Burke describes these little creatures as being “loud and troublesome” and the chirp unpleasant.

Like Samuel Johnson, he must have preferred brick walls to green hedges.

Many people go for a walk and yet are unable to admire Nature simply because their power of observation is untrained. Of course some are not suited to the study at all and do not trouble themselves about it.

In that case they should not talk of what they do not understand. … I might have noticed that I have used the term “Study of Nature.” But it cannot be called a study.

It is a pastime of sheer delight, with naught but beautiful dreams and lovely thoughts, where we are urged forward by the fact that we are in God’s world which He made for us to be our comfort in time of trouble.

… Language cannot express the joy and happy forgetfulness during a ramble in the country.

A happy half-hour! Alas! I enjoy these moments the more as they recede. Not often do I realise the living present. That is always difficult.

It is the mere shades⁠—the ghosts of the dead days⁠—that are dearest to me.

Spent my last day at school. De Quincey says (or was it Johnson?) that whenever we do anything for the last time, provided we have done it regularly for years before, we are a little melancholy, even though it has been distasteful to us.

Bevies of swinging bluebells grew in patches among the grass. Overhead in the oaks I heard secret leaf whispers—those little noiseless noises.

Birds and trees and flowers were secretive and mysterious like expectant motherhood.

All the live things plotted together, having the same big business in hand. Out in the sunlit meadows, there was a different influence abroad. Here everything was gay, lively, irresponsible. The brook prattled like an inconsequential schoolgirl.

Birds and trees and flowers were secretive and mysterious like expectant motherhood. All the live things plotted together, having the same big business in hand. Out in the sunlit meadows, there was a different influence abroad. Here everything was gay, lively, irresponsible.

The brook prattled like an inconsequential schoolgirl.

The Marsh Marigolds in flamboyant yellow sunbonnets played ring-a-ring-a-roses.

I explained at length and received the healing ointment of much sympathy. Went to bed happy with tooth still aching. I fear it was scarcely playing the strict Zolaesque game to divulge the story of my sufferings. …

No, I am not a martyr or a saint. Just an ordinary devil who’s having a rough time.

Had a glorious time on the rocks at low tide prawning. Caught some Five-Bearded Rocklings and a large Cottus bubalis. The sun did not simply shine today—it came rushing down from the sky in a cataract and flooded the sands with light.

Had a glorious time on the rocks at low tide prawning. Caught some Five-Bearded Rocklings and a large Cottus bubalis.

The sun did not simply shine today⁠—it came rushing down from the sky in a cataract and flooded the sands with light.

Sitting on a rock, with prawning net over my knees I looked along three miles of flat hard and yellow sands. The sun poured down on them so heavily that it seemed to raise a luminous golden yellow dust for about three feet high.

I have planned on too big a scale, perhaps. I have put too great a strain on my talents, I have whipped a flagging will, I have been forever cogitating, worrying, devising means of escape. Meanwhile, the moments have gone by unheeded and unenjoyed.

Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy legginess is impossible.

Solitude is good for the soul. After an hour of it, I feel as lofty and imperial as Marcus Aurelius.

Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy legginess is impossible.

Solitude is good for the soul. After an hour of it, I feel as lofty and imperial as Marcus Aurelius.

The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her stockings be down-gyved.

The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her stockings be down-gyved.

Some old people on reaching a certain age go on living out of habit⁠—a bad habit too.

How much I can learn of a stranger by his laugh.

Some old people on reaching a certain age go on living out of habit—a bad habit too.

How much I can learn of a stranger by his laugh.

Bees, Poppies, and Swallows!—and all they mean to him who really knows them! Or a White Gull on a piece of floating timber, or a troop of shiny Rooks close on the heels of a ploughman on a sunny autumn day.

Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?

I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little sorrow.

I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out my pipe and say “Good night,” exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.

Suddenly when the impression was most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and I was back where two and two make four.

Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your secrets!

Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam, for the vacancy in the B.M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of my nine months’ assiduous preparation helped me in only two questions.

Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of living—something that will enable me to accept disappointment with equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At present, ambition consumes me.

I was ambitious before I was breeched.

I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy.

… Of course to the man who believes in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter.

The Christian is the Egoist par excellence.

He does not mind annihilation by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal life. … He is reckless of today, extravagant in the expenditure of his life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon.

There would be no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on anyone—even God.

Sometimes I think I am going mad.

I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face—even my own—become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic.

I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated—a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me.

I wish I were just nothing.

Later: While at a public meeting, the office-boy approached me and immediately whispered without hesitation—

Drew in each breath very gently for fear of aggravating the fiend. Got home (don’t know how) and had some sal volatile. Am better now but very demoralised.

Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short⁠—ill.

After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me, have come to the conclusion that it’s a long way to go to die. Am coming back anyhow. Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.

Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short—ill.

After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me, have come to the conclusion that it’s a long way to go to die. Am coming back anyhow.

Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.

If I die I should like to be buried in the cherry orchards at V⸺.

How the beastly mob loves a tragedy!

The sudden death of the Bank Manager is simply thrilling the town, and the newspapers sell like hot cakes. Scarcely before the body is cold the coincidence of his death on the anniversary of his birth is discussed in every household;

watching myself behave or misbehave, always reflecting on what impression I am making on others or what they think of me. Introduce me to a stranger and I swell out as big as Alice.

Self-consciousness makes me pneumatic, and consequently so awkward and clumsy and swollen that I don’t know how to converse⁠—and God help the other fellow.

Later: Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk.

Later:

Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says.

Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk.

… Timid folk, of course, want some Rock of Ages, something static.

They want life a mill pond rather than the torrent which it is, a homely affair of teacups and tabby cats rather than a dangerous expedition.

Who will rid me of the body of this death? My body is chained to me—a dead weight. It is my warder. I can do nothing without first consulting it and seeking its permission. I jeer at its grotesqueness.

… Timid folk, of course, want some Rock of Ages, something static. They want life a mill pond rather than the torrent which it is, a homely affair of teacups and tabby cats rather than a dangerous expedition.

Who will rid me of the body of this death?

My body is chained to me—a dead weight. It is my warder. I can do nothing without first consulting it and seeking its permission. I jeer at its grotesqueness. I chafe at the thongs it binds on me.

“

Hope thou not much; fear thou not at all

”—my motto of late.

L⸺ was digging up the ground in his garden today and one shovelful came up thick and shapely. He laid the sod on its back gently without breaking it and said simply, “Doesn’t it come up nice?” His face was radiant!—

Real happiness lies in the little things, in a bit of garden work, in the rattle of the teacups in the next room, in the last chapter of a book.

Returned home. I hate living in this little town. If someone dies, he is sure to be someone you had a joke with the night before. A suicide—ten to one—implicates your bosom friend, or else the little man at the bookshop cut him down.

A suicide—ten to one—implicates your bosom friend, or else the little man at the bookshop cut him down. There have been three deaths since I came home—I knew them all. It depresses me.

The town seems a mortuary with all these dead bodies lying in it.

Lucky for you, if you’re a fat, rubicund, unimaginative physician.

He is still ill, and secretly agitated, I fear, because I am so bent on giving up his work. It looks, however, as if newspaper journalism is to be my fate.

It was the refinement of torture having to write.

Had a letter from Dr. S⸺ enough to wring tears from a monument.

The funeral.

It is not death but the dreadful possibilities of life which are so depressing.

A cool, breezy autumn day. The beach was covered with patches of soapy foam that shook tremulously in the wind—all the rocks and everything were drenched with water, and the spray came off the breaking waves like steam.

I added graphically that the man was too far away from me to be able to say what species of Snake it was he was killing.

I possess the qualifications of an artistic liar.

Yet I can’t regard such a story as a lie—it was rather a justifiable emendation of an otherwise uninteresting incident.

The chairman, Sir John Rose Bradford, asked a question, I answered it and then sat down. After the meeting we went upstairs to the library, had tea and chatted with some of the big people. …

Zoology is certainly delightful, yet it seems to me the Zoologists are much as other people. I like Zoology. I wish I could do without Zoologists.

…

Today I am easier.

The cut worm forgives the plough.

But how restless this disappointment has made me. … I have no plans for recuperation and cannot settle down to work.

I intend to go on however.

I have decided that my death shall be disputed all the way.

Oh! it is so humiliating to die! I writhe to think of being overcome by so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and sisters who believe in me.

I intend to go on however. I have decided that my death shall be disputed all the way.

Oh! it is so humiliating to die!

I writhe to think of being overcome by so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and sisters who believe in me.

Oh! it is so humiliating to die! I writhe to think of being overcome by so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and sisters who believe in me.

As an Egotist I hate death because I should cease to be I.

Most folk, when sick unto death, gain a little consolation over the notoriety gained by the fact of their decease. Criminals enjoy the pomp and circumstance of their execution.

But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own immediate decease—an unobtrusive passing away of a rancorous, disappointed, morbid, and self-assertive entomologist in a West Kensington Boarding House—what a mean little tragedy!

It is hard not to be somebody even in death.

A singsong tonight in the drawing-room; all the boardinghouse present in full muster.

I can think of no more interesting volume than a detailed, intimate, psychological history of my own life. I want a perfect comprehension at least of myself. …

We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship⁠—provided it is great enough⁠—flatters our self-importance.

We feel that a calamity by overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. A man likes not to be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always happy.

We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship—provided it is great enough—flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows.

A man likes not to be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always happy.

Over to see E⸺. Came away disillusioned.

“Oh! but it rests with you,” she said.

Am I in love? God knows⁠—but I don’t suppose God cares.

On M⸺’s advice went to see a stomach specialist—Dr. Hawkins.

Here I am once more. A passable night. After breakfast the intermittency recommenced—it is better now, with a dropped beat only about once per half-hour, so that I am almost happy after yesterday, which was Hell.

The world is too good to give up without remonstrance at the beck of a weak heart.

Before I went to sleep last night, my watch stopped—I at once observed the cessation of its tick and wondered if it were an omen. I was genuinely surprised to find myself still ticking when I awoke this morning.

… dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible—and eternal, so that come what may to my “Soul,” my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part—I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie.

When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me⁠—but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.

“It is a pleasure to note the success attending the career of Mr. W. N. P. Barbellion now engaged in scientific work on the staff of the Natural History Museum …” etc., etc.

Paleontology has its comfortable words too. I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live dangerously, indifferent to my fate;

I have discovered I am a fly, that we are all flies, that nothing matters.

It’s a great load off my life, for I don’t mind being such a microorganism—to me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe—such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour.

From the drawing-room window I see pass almost daily an old gentleman with white hair, a firm step, broad shoulders, healthy pink skin, a sunny smile—always singing to himself as he goes—a happy, rosy-cheeked old fellow, with a rosy-cheeked mind. …

I should like to throw mud at him. By Jove, how I hate him.

He makes me wince with my own pain. It is heartless, indecently so, for an old man to be so blithe. Life has, I suppose, never lain in wait for him. The Great Anarchist has spared him a bomb.

By Jove, how I hate him. He makes me wince with my own pain. It is heartless, indecently so, for an old man to be so blithe. Life has, I suppose, never lain in wait for him.

The Great Anarchist has spared him a bomb.

My Aunt, aged seventy-five, who has apparently concluded from my constant absences from Church that my spiritual life is in a parlous way, today read me her portion from a large book with a broad purple-tasseled bookmark.

M⸺ is religious and after I had disclosed my physique to him yesterday (for the 99th time) he remained on his knees by the couch in his consulting room (after working my reflexes) for a moment or two in the attitude of prayer.

When the Doctor prays for you⁠—better call in the undertaker.

My epitaph “He played Ludo well.” The game anyhow requires moral stamina—ask H⸺.

At R⸺. Mugged about all day. Put on a gramophone record—then crawled up into a corner of the large, empty drawing room and ate my heart out.

Heart has a bitter taste⁠—if it’s your own.

Sat in the “morning room” feeling ill. In the chair opposite sat Aunt Fanny, aged 86, knitting. I listened to the click of her needles, while out in the garden a thrush sang, and there was a red sunset.

Why doesn’t he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he pass me everything but the poison?

Why am I such an unconscionably long time dying?

What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull Earth, to be no longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the Earth creating attraction and …

To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever hated them—the ignominy of being dead!

What voluble talker likes his mouth to be stopped with earth, who relishes the idea of the carrion worm mining in the seat of the intellect?

Staying at the King’s Hotel, ⸻. Giddiness very bad. Death seems unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?

With perfect self-abnegation, I held out my hand to them and wished them all “God Speed.”

It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being niggardly over our lives.

We are all of us “shelling out.” And we can afford to be generous, for we shall all—some early, some late—be bankrupt in the end. For my part, I’ve had a short and boisterous voyage and shan’t be sorry to get into port.

Presently I got up and walked past—in the knowledge that she must now be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later we met face to face and I broke the ice. She’s a pretty girl. … So too is her sister.

Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my sinuous lips.

Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation to dinner. … I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening with three pretty girls.

“You’ve heard the news about B⸺?”

Won’t all this seem piffle if I don’t die after all! As an artist in life I ought to die; it is the only artistic ending

—and I ought to die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor’s bill.

With the sudden eclipse of the foreman’s interest, the incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him behind the Harbour-master’s Office playing “Shove-ha’penny” or skittles with the pile still swinging in midair. …

After all it was only a bloody pile.

Suffering from depression. … The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way back to my hotel caught sight of H⸺, jumping into a cab, after a visit to S⸺ Sands.

Everything was wonderful!

I strode along over the level sands infatuated with the sheer ability to put one leg in front of the other and walk.

I loved to feel the muscles of my thighs working, and to swing my arms in rhythm with the stride. The stiff breeze had blown the sky clear, and was rushing through my long hair, and bellowing into each ear.

… This is a hand-to-mouth existence. My own inner life is scorching up all outside interests.

Zoology appears as a curious thing in a Baghdad bazaar.

I sit in my room at the B.M. and play with it; I let it trickle through my fingers and roll away like a child playing with quicksilver.

I therefore hereby record that I find myself in an absorbingly interesting place where I live, move and have my being, dominated by one monstrous feature above all others—the mystery of it all! Everything is so astonishing, my own existence so incredible!

Nothing explains itself. Everyone is dumb. It is like walking about at a masqued Ball.

… Even I myself am a mystery to me. How wonderful and frightening that is—to feel yourself—your innermost and most substantial possession to be a mystery, incomprehensible. I look at myself in the mirror and mock at myself.

On some days I am to myself as strange and unfamiliar as a Pterodactyl. There is a certain grim humour in finding myself here possessed of a perfectly arbitrary arrangement of lineaments when I never asked to be here and never selected my own attributes.

To the dignity of a human being it seems like a coarse practical joke.

… My own freakish physique is certainly a joke.

In ten minutes I should have told him all my personal history. But he was thirsting for a drink and went off quickly and left me with my heart unburdened.

London is a lonely place.

Today journeyed to ⸻ where I gave evidence as an expert in Economic Entomology at the County Court in a case concerning damage to furniture by mites for which I am paid £8 8s. fee and expenses and travelled first class. What irony!

… do something, go somewhere, I have dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright—but only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of some incurable disorder.

Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis, I’ve only been Jones with dyspepsia.

So, too, in other directions, big events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in giving up newspaper journalism and breaking through that steel environment—but only to become an Entomologist!

by Herculean efforts I succeeded in giving up newspaper journalism and breaking through that steel environment—but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success in an Essay in the Academy, which attracted attention—a debut, however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived.

It is always not quite.

Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the Furniture Record seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I received him ironically—but little did he understand.

Dear, dear, where will it all end?

It’s a sad business when you fall in love with a girl you don’t like.

Spent a romping day at the Flat. Kissed her sister twice under the mistletoe, and in the evening went to a cinema. After supper made a mock heroic speech and left hilarious.

I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest—after all—I should be done out of my Essentials of Histology.

Even in the Library I very nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read.

There were a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another poor little pinned insects in collecting-boxes … It was really a one-man show, Prof.

In short, it was fat, round, and greasy. He wore black moustachios with curly ends, his eyes were dark shining, bulgy, and around his neck was wrapped a scarf inside a dirty linen collar, as if he had a sore throat.

I sat behind him and hated him steadily, perseveringly.

At Hammersmith the three girls got off, and the bulgy-eyed Italian watched them go with lascivious eyes, looking over the rail and down at them on the pavement—still interested. I looked down too. They crossed the road in front of us and disappeared.

My mind became a morass of current Divorce Court News, Society Gossip—“if Sir A. goes Romeward, if Miss B. sings true”—and advertisements.

I went on reading because I was afraid to be alone with myself.

B⸺ arrived at tea and after saying he felt very “pin-eyed” swallowed a glass of Bols gin—the Gin of Antony Bols—and recovered sufficiently to inform me delightedly that he had just won £50. He told me all the story;

I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or (better still) a onetime organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane.

It must be very dull to remain stationary⁠—once a peer always a peer.

Miss ⸻ heard me sigh today and asked what it might mean. “Only the sparks flying upward,” I answered lugubriously.

Miss ⸻ heard me sigh today and asked what it might mean. “Only the sparks flying upward,” I answered lugubriously.

A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness.

Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly—honest then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.

A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness. Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly—honest then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.

An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennae.

Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It’s abominable. Best literature for the latrine: picture puzzles.

Bad heart attack all day.

Intermittency is very refined torture to one who wants to live very badly.

Your pump goes a “dot and carry one,” or say “misses a stitch,” what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your friend’s hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you order another pint of beer.

Your pump goes a “dot and carry one,” or say “misses a stitch,” what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your friend’s hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you order another pint of beer.

It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between its teeth.

I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven’t much confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable kennel.

Yet it’s all smoke.

Our love is unassailable⁠—it’s like the law of gravitation, you cannot dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.

N⸺ is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore intervened on his side!

His hands are deep in his trousers’ pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to hide the ravages of lupus. …

He seemed the last man on earth⁠—after everyone else had died of the plague.

Not a soul in the station. Not a train. And this is June!

… He seemed the last man on earth—after everyone else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a train. And this is June!

Spent the day measuring the legs and antennae of lice to two places of decimals!

To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by measuring the legs of lice.

I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner of life suits my incurable frivolousness.

I am a Magpie in a Baghdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive, fascinated by a lot of astonishing things

: e.g., a book on the quadrature of the circle, the gabbertushed fustilugs passage in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr.

e.g., a book on the quadrature of the circle, the gabbertushed fustilugs passage in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr. Hogsflesh, Tweezer’s Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent, conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning.

Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry.

My mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.

Surely, even a single exposure to—say Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—must result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul.

No one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed through him.

If one could develop a human soul like a negative the effect I should say could be seen. … I’ll tell you what I wish they’d do—seriously:

I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these things.

I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning, Popocatepetl.

I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish Maenads shout Women’s Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me.

That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of security.

I have never felt permanently settled in this life⁠—nothing more than a shadowy locum tenens, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely to disappear any moment.

At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is too late … and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more.

But I won’t give in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I write things down so as to look them up in reference books—

I am always looking up the things I remember I have forgotten.

…

I would utter a whole commination service in my present state of mind.

To me woman is the wonderful fact of existence.

If there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me on entering …

But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a little somehow today. But it’s all in desperation, not in faith.

Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the consolation of genius.

Am better today. My better self is convinced that it is silly and small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny—especially at times like these when—God love us all—there is a column of casualties each day.

The great thing to be thankful for is that I am alive and alive now, that I was alive yesterday, and even may be tomorrow. Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of?

I’m a lucky dog to be alive at all.

My plight is bad, but there are others in a worse one. I’m going to be brave and fight on the side of Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!

Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience because I was afraid to stop.

Given a weak constitution, a great ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one, I might have known I was in for trouble.

Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of my own. Who are you? I wondered.

Already I have found some heartrending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was born in 1889.

A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason than to tie his tie and brush his hair.

What does he think of his face? He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out of taste to entertain opinions about one’s personal appearance.

The adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War.

Christian resignation is a feeble thing.

Why won’t this demure widow with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits this iniquitous war?

Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and Worthington’s, and I rounded it up in a typical cockeyed manner—

“Ah! yes, it’s only when the day is over that the day really begins⁠—what?”

I expressed to R⸺ today my admiration for the exploit of the brave and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!) R⸺ was rather cold. “His exploits,” said this bloody fool, “involve loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic.”

Shall I ever find anyone? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and milky.

I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.

Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St. Paul’s, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.

… election meetings in remote Exmoor villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)—all are gone—too remote to bear recital—yet just sufficiently clear to harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from the dead in my consciousness.

I hate to think it is lost; that my youth is buried⁠—a cemetery without even headstones.

To an inquest on a drowned sailor—disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the coast—with a pitiful myopia—I preferred Wiedersheim’s Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates. I used to carry Dr.

I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All that time is just as if it had never been.

My recollections form only an indefinite smudge

—odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen after their day’s ploughing), election meetings …

This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence.

When I had dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into merely aesthetic malaise.

A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea (like the swine I am). Could I see him?

She observed me carefully—I’m looking a perfect wreck—tu l’as voulu, George Dandin—but it’s mainly ill-health and not on her account.

“Some things are too funny to laugh at.”

“Is that why you are so solemn?”

I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself, and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and disgust.

I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her.

Instead of a passion, only a dragging heavy chain of attraction … some inflexible law makes me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I cannot look away. …

This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I marvel how God can stick it—lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That is how I live too—but then I am not God.

I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to drink.

I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my best to forget myself.

The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a soft warm embrace. … I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody for solo violin in Chopin’s Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged for hours.

Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body, purely physical.

This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble together through dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!

Yet there were women sitting alongside me today—knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere.

They would have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.

At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.

At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea!

It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.

Just lately I’ve heard a lot of music including Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write.

… The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate intensity of the will to destroy. … And Tchaikovsky was a Russian!

Debussy was a welcome change. “L’Après-midi d’un Faun” is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn.

Oh! so tired!

It is indeed impossible without sending him to a lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his self-esteem. …

A man’s loyalty to himself is the most pigheaded thing imaginable.

“This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to anyone who in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss.”

That gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to breakfast ready for the day’s pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place.

I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a glassy, mesmerised face⁠—a fainéant.

How different from that extremely busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say—could that lad be I? How many hours do I waste daydreaming.

The truth is

I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments and they are often at war.

To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible. Consequently plenty of waste and fever and—as I might have discovered earlier for myself—success almost out of the question. If only I were purebred science or purebred art!

To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible. Consequently plenty of waste and fever and—as I might have discovered earlier for myself—success almost out of the question. If only I were purebred science or purebred art!

Life is a dream and we are all somnambules.

We know that for a fact at all times when we are most intensely alive—at crises of unprecedented change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought swiftly to a close like a vision!

If someone shows them glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech, etc.?

I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul.

The Punch and Judy Show

I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything.

The bare fact of existence paralyses me⁠—holds my mind in mortmain.

To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still and merely breathe—like an infant on its back in a cot.

In Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia, I am interested to find “why Jews do not stink, what is the superstition of sneezing after saluting, wherefore negroes are black,” and so forth.

There is a poetic appropriateness that in AD 1915 I should be occupied mainly in the study of Lice. I like the insolence of it.

They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre 100 years? Consider the date of the first Egyptian dynasty!

Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same tenement!

A crowd makes egotists of us all.

Most men find it repugnant to them to submerge themselves in a sea of their fellows. A silent, listening crowd is potentially full of commotion.

“A good round oath,” he answered quietly.

“If it was a square one it wouldn’t roll properly,” I said.

It is nice to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy.

“If it was a square one it wouldn’t roll properly,” I said. It is nice to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy.

The true test of happiness is whether you know what day of the week it is.

A miserable man is aware of this even in his sleep. To be as cheerful and rosy-cheeked on Monday as on Saturday, and at breakfast as at dinner is to—well, make an ideal husband.

…

It is a strange metempsychosis, this transformation of an enthusiast⁠—tense, excitable, and active, into a sceptic, nerveless, ironical, and idle.

That’s what ill-health can do for a man. To be among enthusiasts—zoologists, geologists, entomologists—as I frequently am, makes me feel a very old man, regarding them as children, and provokes painful retrospection and sugary sentimentality over my past flame now burnt out.

Some folk don’t like to walk over Bluebells or Buttercups or other flowers growing on the ground.

But it is foolish to try to pamper Nature as if she were a sickly child. She is strong and can stand it.

You can stamp on and crush a thousand flowers—they will all come up again next year.

“It’s funny,” she said, “but I thought your letters were cold. Letters are so horrid.”

The incident shows how impossible is intellectual honesty between lovers.

Truth is at times a hound which must to kennel.

The incident shows how impossible is intellectual honesty between lovers.

Truth is at times a hound which must to kennel.

“Write as you would speak,” said I. “You know I’m not one to carp about a spelling mistake!”

She brought in two double-yolked Ducks’ eggs for us to see and marvel at. In the breakfast room stands a stuffed Collie dog in a glass case.

I’d as soon embalm my grandmother and keep her on the sideboard.

I asked young George, the farm-boy, what bird went like this: I whistled it. He looked abashed and said a Chaffinch.

… Am I a moral monster? Surely a man who can combine such calculating callousness with really generous impulses of the heart is—what?

The truth is I think I am in love with her: but I am also mightily in love with myself. One or the other has to give.

If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say I was a ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look out of the window then at the mirror—turning my head sideways perhaps so as to see it in profile.

However vigilant and artful a diarist may be, plenty of things escape him and in any event recollection is not recreation. …

To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental kind.

A journal intime is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity.

My outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I analyse myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly better than I appear.

I am Christ and the Devil at the same time

—or as my sister once called me—a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one. Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions.

But no one knows this because by the time I come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite powerless to intervene.

Similarly my murders end merely in a little phlegm.

On a bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large, red udder, which she swung into the baby’s face.

“My dear sir,” I answered expansively,

“I am as poor as you are. You at least have seen better days you say⁠—but I never have.”

He changed in a minute his cringing manner and rejoined:

In this fashion, he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even hybridised the two different species!

In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice.

Am spending my summer holidays in the Lakes at Coniston with G⸺ and R⸺. … I am simply consumed with pride at being among the mountains at last! It is an enormous personal success to have arrived at Coniston!

This evening we walked through the Churchyard reading tombstone inscriptions.

What a lot of men have had wives!

I can’t make out what has come over folk recently: the wit, wisdom and irony on the old tombstones have given place to maudlin sentiment and pious Bible references.

For example the War. “Simply from motives of curiosity.” Why certainly, no other than these, concerning one of the most remarkable murders in the annals of crime.

And murders anyhow are damned interesting⁠—which the Saturday Review isn’t.

I was surprised to discover the other day that when I talked of Chipples no one understood what I meant! It proves to be a dialect word familiar to all residents in Devonshire and designating spring onions. Anyway you won’t find it in Murray’s Dictionary;

A jejune comment like this makes me grin like a gargoyle! Hark to the fellow—this leader-writer over his cup of tea. But it is a lesson to show how easily and quickly we have all adapted ourselves to the War.

The War is everything; it is noble, filthy, great, petty, degrading, inspiring, ridiculous, glorious, mad, bad, hopeless yet full of hope.

I don’t know what to think about it.

The War is everything; it is noble, filthy, great, petty, degrading, inspiring, ridiculous, glorious, mad, bad, hopeless yet full of hope. I don’t know what to think about it.

I hate elderly women who mention their legs. It makes me shudder.

I had two amusing conversations this morning, one with a jealous old man of 70 summers who, in spite of his age, is jealous—I can find no other term—of me in spite of mine, and the other with a social climber.

… mention I am giving an address at ⸻, and he says “Oom,” and at once begins his reminiscences, which I have heard many times before, and am sometimes tempted to correct him when, his memory failing, he leaves out an essential portion of his story.

Thus do crabbed age and boastful youth tantalise one another.

To the social climber I said slyly:

The Anatomy of the Psocidae.

The strength of my ambition at any given moment is the measure of my state of health.

It must really be an extraordinarily tenacious thing to have hung on through all my recent experiences. Considerately enough this great Crab lets go of my big toe when I am sunk low in health, yet pinches devilishly hard as now when I am well.

“Ah! well,” I say, looking infernally deep, “pessimism is a good policy; it’s like having your cake and eating it at the same time.”

“Because if the future turns out badly you can say, ‘I told you so,’ to your own satisfaction, and if all is well, why you share everyone else’s satisfaction.”

Or I say: “No, I can’t swim; and I don’t want to!”

I smile with sardonic amusement when I reflect how the War has changed my status.

Before the War I was an interesting invalid. Now I am a lucky dog.

Then, I was a star turn in tragedy; now I am drowned and ignored in an overcrowded chorus. No valetudinarian was ever more unpleasantly jostled out of his self-compassion. It is difficult to accustom myself to the new role all at once:

“Oh! several in the Manchester Guardian,” I told him out of vanity. “But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to extra-war topics.”

I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying⁠—out of vanity too.

So that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself. Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.

That means a parson apiece—and in war time too.

My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don’t deserve anybody else’s.

In many respects, however, this Journal I believe gives the impression that I behave myself in the public gaze much worse than I actually do. You must remember that herein I let myself go at a stretch gallop:

I poured out its acid sentiment with the base revenge of a vitriol thrower, and then became quiescent.

It is a helpless feeling, sitting still and watching circumstances pounding away at my malleable character and moulding it wrongly.

We have a delightful American neighbour here whose life revolves like the flywheel of an engine. Even when not in eruption his volcanic energy is always rumbling and can be heard.

Crawled up through the path-fields to the uplands and sat in a field in the sun with my back against a haystack.

I was so immobile in my dejection that Flies and Grasshoppers came and perched about me. This made me furious. “I am not dead yet,” I said, “get away,” and I would suddenly drive them off.

… In horrible dejection. …

My sensibility is dulled too. It chagrins me to find that my present plight by no means overwhelms me with anguish as it would have done once. It only worries me.

I am just a worried ox.

The numbness in my right hand is getting very trying. … The Baby puts the lid on it all. Can’t you see the sordid picture? I can, and it haunts me. To be paralysed with a wife and child and no money—ugh!

The numbness in my right hand is getting very trying. … The Baby puts the lid on it all. Can’t you see the sordid picture? I can, and it haunts me. To be paralysed with a wife and child and no money—ugh!

Retribution proceeds with an almost mathematical accuracy of measure.

It would necessitate a vernier rather than a chain. There is no mercy in Cause and Effect. It is inhuman clockwork. Every single act expended brings one its precise equivalent in return. …

E⸺ has had a setback and is in bed again. However sclerotic my nerve tissue, I feel as flaccid as a jelly.

My God! how I loathe the prospect of death.

I must have some music or I shall hear the paralysis creeping. That is why I lie in bed and whistle.

“My dear Brown, what am I to do?” (I like to dramatise myself like that—it is an anodyne).

I feel as if I were living alone on Ascension Island with the tide coming up continuously, up and up and up.

She has known all from the beginning! M⸺ warned her not to marry me. How brave and loyal of her! What an ass I have been. I am overwhelmed with feelings of shame and self-contempt and sorrow for her.

… I was in an impish mood and said: “Oh! dear, I’m full of misery.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, “so am I.”

E⸺ has been telling me some of her emotions during and after her fateful visit to my Doctor just before our marriage. He did not spare her and even estimated the length of my life after I had once taken to my bed—about 12 months.

He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment’s hesitation, she went upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.

And I believe if he had said “Rats,” she would have shot out silently into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of such service.

“You did not come, And marching time drew on and wore me numb— Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure loving-kindness’ sake Grieved I, when, …

My back is aching and the cold is so intense that unless I crouch over the fire hands and feet become immediately stone-cold. All day I have crouched over the fire, reading newspapers, listening to fog signals and the screaming of the baby. …

I have been in a torpor, like a Bat in a cavern⁠—really dead yet automatically hanging on to life by my hind legs.

“To stand upon one’s guard against Death exasperates her malice and protracts our sufferings.”

I told him I was an agnostic. “There are several interesting lines of thought down here,” he said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over Jesus Christ.

The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin.

I therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan’t get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me.

I therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan’t get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me.

Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close.

Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.

that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de Maupassant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly dismantled by opium.

If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In short, if life were an art and not a lottery!

In the lives of all of us, how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts, blind—how many lost days—and man’s life is but a paltry three score years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.

Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas.

What a solemn lunatic the world is.

Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and deeply channelled by the recent rain.

Wales, that historic errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important role he once played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after years of separation.

The New Year came in like a thief in the night⁠—noiselessly; no bells, no syrens, no songs by order of the Government.

Nothing could have been more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this—seeing what the year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.

The other day a man came and set up a post in the garden for the clothes’ line.

As soon as I saw the post I said “gibbet”⁠—it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the malefactor.

Last night while E⸺ was nursing the baby I most delightfully remarked: “What a little parasite—why you are Cleopatra affixing the aspic—‘Tarry, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.’ ”

Yet, on the whole, I find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new, intact on the threshold:

I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a suit of dirty clothes.

My life and person are patched and greasy; hers is new and without a single blemish or misfortune. … Moreover, she makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.

My hope is that I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.

Out of doors today it’s like the roaring forties! Every tree I passed in the lane was a great wind instrument, bellowing out a passionate song, and the sky was torn to ribbons.

It is cold enough to freeze the nose off a brass Monkey, but very exhilarating. I stood on the hill and squared my fists to the wind and bade everything come on.

But I had no taste for any such profanity, and even as I looked the sun came out from behind a cloud very slowly, bringing the picture into clearer focus, chasing away shadows and bringing out all the colours.

The landscape resumed its homely aspect: an English park with Firs in it.

Last night, I pulled aside the window curtain of our front door and peeped out.

Tonight, I have lost this paroxysm. For I am home again by the fireside. All the multitude have disappeared from my view. I have lost them, everyone.

I have lost another day of my life and so have they, and we have lost each other.

Meanwhile the great world spins on unrelentingly, frittering away lightly my precious hours (surely a small stock now?) while I sit discomfited by the evening fire and nurse my scraped hands that tingle because the spinning world has wrenched itself out of my feeble grasp.

It is excoriating to be thus wasting the last few precious days of my life in such mummery merely to get bread to eat. They might at least let me die in peace, and with fitting decorum.

It is so ignoble to be tinkering about in a Museum among Scarabees and insects when I ought to be reflecting on life and death.

I ask myself what ought to be my most appropriate reaction in such circumstances as the present? Why, of course, to carry on as if all were normal, and the future unknown: why, so I do, to outward view, for the sake of the others.

As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don’t know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone.

This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower.

I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world.

It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the place, and the manner of one’s exit. For what disturbs me in particular is how I shall conduct myself;

I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a fear of fear.

By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer’s day, with an open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and Miall and Denny’s Cockroach.

By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer’s day, with an open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and Miall and Denny’s Cockroach.

It would be stage-managing my own demise and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!

I think it was De Quincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old bones.

But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists, the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these adventures I intended one day to make. …

It is not much fun ticking off things you have done from a list if you have done very little.

I get more satisfaction out of a list of books.

Other people say of me, “Oh! I expect he read it in a book.”

I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish.

To any bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my intense chagrin, often from mere shyness.

And strange to say it is the “good” people above all who most bitterly disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he arouses no expectations, and so I get no heartburning.

It is the good, the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood’s beliefs.

… I am a cynic then, but not a reckless cynic—a careworn unhappy cynic without the cynic’s pride. “It is easy to be cynical,” someone admonished me. “Unfortunately it is,” I said.

It is the good, the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood’s beliefs. … I am a cynic then, but not a reckless cynic—a careworn unhappy cynic without the cynic’s pride.

“It is easy to be cynical,” someone admonished me. “Unfortunately it is,” I said.

We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the Englishman’s reserve.

To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch, no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain.

Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then!

Swinburne has some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no other descriptions by either pen or brush.

“But you’ll wear just one weed or two for me?” I plead, and then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise, she will marry again.

Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the young fellow at once, so as to put him through his paces⁠—show him where the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.

You will observe what a relish I have for my own macabre, and how keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman’s beard.

It is odd to find her determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness—one would have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for the impudence of my desires.

I wanted everything so I get nothing. I gave nothing so I receive nothing.

I am not offering up my life willingly—it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the pilfering with lamentable eyes.

Why this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I gave nothing so I receive nothing.

I am not offering up my life willingly⁠—it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the pilfering with lamentable eyes.

I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.

My hand gets a little better.

But it’s a cat and mouse game, and so humiliating to be the mouse.

… Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt, they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past.

Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was “gold dusty from tumbling among the stars,”

Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the other frightened.

I like Pascal’s prostration before the infinities of Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than the uplift afforded him by religion.