Note:– As far as possible quotations have been arranged in chronological order within each section. Antiquated spellings such as Scyros and Tchekov have been silently modernised; obvious errors silently corrected. The liberty has also been taken of substituting names for initials, of capitalising the initial letter of “space” in a quotation where the context demanded it and of deitalicising wherever the lack of context rendered italics infelicitous.
Himself
There is one power which I have to an unusual extent developed, so I think, and that is the faculty of divesting my thoughts of all subjectivity. I can see myself as so much specialised protoplasm. Sometimes I almost think that in thus divesting the mind of particulars I seize the universal and for a short but vivid moment look through the veil at “the thing itself.” I really cannot make myself clear without a great deal of care, and I hope you will not misunderstand me.
But, to diverge somewhat, it was only the other day that suddenly, when I was not expecting it, I saw mother’s face in an objective way. I saw and looked on it as a stranger who had never seen her; and mind you, there is a good deal of difference between these two points of view. I never realised until that moment that we look on those whom we know so well in the light and shade of the knowledge we have gained before….
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.
What annoys me is that other folk – the brainless, heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as one of themselves.
I am rings within rings, circles concentric and intersecting, a maze, a tangle: watching myself behave or misbehave, always reflecting on what impression I am making on others or what they think of me.
Give me the man who will surrender the whole world for a moss or a caterpillar, and impracticable visions for a simple human delight. Yes, that shall be my practice. I prefer Richard Jefferies to Swedenborg and Oscar Wilde to Thomas à Kempis.
Even as a boy, I can remember being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing cross-examinations – no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more mercilessly.
I look into the glass, and am baffled by the intolerable strangeness that that face is mine, that I am I, that my name is Barbellion.
Not only ourselves, but everything is bound about with innumerable concentric walls of impenetrable armour. I long to pull them down, to tear down all the curtains, screens, and dividing partitions, to walk about with my clothes off, to make a large ventral incision and expose my heart. I am sick of being tied up in flesh and clothes, hemmed in by walls, by proses, deceits. I want to pull people by the nose and be brutally candid. I want everyone to know, to be told everything.
I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at my double-facedness, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It’s like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes.
I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul.
I think I should love Russians if I knew them. I believe I have most in common with the Russian temperament. How else explain that in Russian books – in Lermontov, in Turgenev, in Dostoevsky, in Chekhov, Pushkin, Goncharov, and others – I so frequently find almost exact transcripts of my own life and character. It is like seeing oneself constantly in a portrait gallery, and naturally flatters a reader’s vanity.
Often in the middle of a quite vivid ten seconds of life, I find I have switched myself off from myself to make room for the person of a disinterested and usually vulgar spectator. Even in the thrill of a devotional kiss I have overheard myself saying, “Hot stuff, this witch.” Or in a room full of agreeable and pleasant people, while I am being as agreeable as I know how, comes the whisper in a cynical tone, “These damned women.” I am apparently a triple personality:
(1) The respectable youth.
(2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic.
(3) The real but unknown I.
If Lucifer was proud, he was not so proud as I: it wounds my self-esteem not to be able to perform miracles, to move mountains, to play fast and loose with base clay, to be in direct telepathic rapport with the universe and its beauty.
When a geologist speaks of the Cambrian, I want to cross myself; when great formulas like “interstellar space” or “secular time” thunder in my ears, I want to crawl away like a rat into a hole and die.
I have always meddled with things that are too high for me, my first adventure being Berkeley at the age of fifteen, a philosopher who captured my amazement over a period of many months.
[A]ctual crimes have many a time been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes be? Nothing much – only murders, theft, rape, etc.
Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the fire, I garner a bitter-sweet contentment in making ideal reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind – that sacred glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated.
The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character hypnotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.
For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting, credulous.
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 heart-burning.
Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting me to the quick.
Surely, I muse, a man cannot be accounted a failure who succeeds at last in calling in all his idle desires and wandering motives, and with utter restfulness concentrating his life on the benison of Death.
My life has certainly been an astonishing episode in human story. To me, it appears as a titanic struggle between consuming ambition and adverse fortune. Behold a penniless youth thirsting for knowledge introduced into the world out of sheer devilment, hundreds of miles from a university, with a towering ambition, but cursed with ill-health and a twofold nature – pleasure-loving as well as labour-loving. The continuous, almost cunning frustration of my endeavours long ago gave me a sense of struggle with some evil genius.
Ever since I came into it, I have felt an alien in this life – a refugee by reason of some pre-natal extradition. I always felt alien to my father and mother. I was different from them. I knew and was conscious of the detachment. They seemed the children and I was a very old man.
I was a little alien among my schoolfellows. I knew I was different, and accepted my ostracism as a quite natural consequence. I never played games with them….
It was the same in London. I was alien to my colleagues and led a private life, totally outside their imaginings. Among them only Robson, dear fellow, has ventured to approach my life, and seek a communion with me. And I can’t believe he has suffered any hurt. I am not a live wire.
Intellectual pride has been the bane of my life. Yet I must be fair to myself. Who, I should like to know, has received greater incentive to this vice? Have not inferior types all my life choked me, bound me, romped over me?
I could botanise over my own grave, attentively examine the maggots out of my own brain.
His Wife
In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love – as one would a bastard child – I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed…. That is all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated essence of womanhood that flowed from her….
Eleanor and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual and complete – parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if they knew…. You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers. Voilà!
What delights me is to recall that our love has evolved. It did not suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed slowly to perfection – it was forged in the white heat of our experiences. That is why it will always remain.
Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who is love.
His Compatriots
Englishmen are difficult to get to know. Within the circle of their own collars, trespassers will be prosecuted.
His Journal
I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people and say: “There! that’s me! You may like it or lump it, but it’s true. And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite everybody’s inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm.” As we are all such worms we should at least be honest worms.
Verily I lead a curious double existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable, mealy-mouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a contemptuous, arrogant malcontent.
To erect a monument is like trying to fix a stick into the bed of the Niagara. No memorial as large and wonderful as the Taj Mahal can stay the passage of a grief, no pen can preserve an emotion held for a while in the sweet shackles of a sonnet’s rules. Neither pen nor brush nor chisel knows the art of perpetuation.
In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.
It is almost impossible to tell the truth. In this journal I have tried, but I have not succeeded. I have set down a good deal, but I cannot tell it. Truth of self has to be left by the psychology-miner at the bottom of his boring. Perhaps fifty or a hundred years hence Posterity may be told, but Contemporary will never know.
I am the scientific investigator of myself, and if the published researches bring me into notice, I am not averse from it, though interest in my work comes first.
If I were to sum up my life in one word I should say suffocation. Robson has been my one blowhole. Now I look forward to a little oxygen when my Journal is published! I am delighted and horrified at the same time. What will my relatives say? ’Twill be the surprise of their lives. I regard it as a revanche. The world has always gagged and suppressed me – now I turn and hit it in the belly.
My diary is too unpleasant for popularity. It is my passion for taking folk by the nose and giving them a wigging, my fierce contempt for every kind of complacency.
My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, but intellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.
… I know that the Journal will mean horror to some. I realise that a strong-minded man would by instinct keep his sufferings to himself – the Englishman above all – (but I doubt if I am an Englishman really. My true home I guess is further east).
Friends and relatives say I have not drawn my real self. But that’s because I’ve taken my clothes off and they can’t recognise me stark! The book is a self-portrait in the nude.
His Illness
Ill-health, when chronic, is like a permanent ligature around one’s life.
My chief discovery in sickness and misfortune is the callousness of people to our case – not from hard-heartedness (everyone is kind), but from absence of sympathetic imagination.
Suffering does not only insulate. It drops its victim on an island in an ocean desert where he sees men as distant ships passing.
Human Beings
The human body, what a wonderful mechanism it is! It never ceases to astonish me that anyone – on waking up in this world and finding himself in possession of a body – his only bit of real property – should be satisfied when he has clothed and fed it. One would think that the infant’s first articulated request would be for a primer of physiology.
The human spirit is unconquerable. You’ll come through if you fight.
The difference between a highly developed human – say, like Meredith – and his housemaid is greater than the difference between the highest ape and the housemaid.
Women
I said I thought women were either angels or devils.
I have often wondered how a beautiful woman regards her body. The loveliness which I must seek outside myself sleeps on “the ivories of her pure members.” She carries the incommunicable secret in herself, in the texture of her own skin, and the contour of her own breasts. She is a guardian of the hidden treasure which fills the flowers and lives in the sunset. How must it be to possess so burning a secret hidden even to the possessor? What must she think on looking into the glass?
I had never set eyes on any beautiful women until I came to London. Then I was dazzled by them all – in every rank or station, in the street or on the street, in the Café de l’Europe or the Café Royal – pretty, laughing girls, handsome women, or beautiful pieces of mere flesh only…. I was doomed to destruction from the first.
Love – and Marriage
As for marriage, intellectual honesty between husband and wife is ever a dangerous experiment and one which few could practise if they would. For love is a fog and most marriages are built on inaccuracies if not on lies.
There is no true love short of possession, and no true possession short of eating. Every lover is a beast of ravin, every Romeo would be a cannibal if he dared.
Sex
Thanks to Christian teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and dirty jokes.
The perfectly enfranchised poet – and Walt Whitman in “The Song of Myself” came near being it – should be as ready to sing of the incredible raptures of the sexual act between “twin souls” as of the clouds or sunshine.
Egotism
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 to-day, extravagant in the expenditure of his life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.
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.
When colossal egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain – the pain one might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.
A crowd makes egotists of us all.
In sickness, in health, in sorrow, joy, failure, or success, in every conceivable set of circumstances, the ego sits enthroned, surrounded only by the bodyguard of his own self-consciousness, self-pity, self-admiration, self-love, and from these not even the anarchy of self-hate can drive him forth, for he will still love himself in hating himself for his own self-love.
The Ego is a monarch, and, like a monarch, unapproachable. In every one of us our insulation is complete.
Passionate egotism knows no shame.
[T]oo complete a divorce from self provokes self-antipathy, too great a preoccupation with self leads to self-sickness and by the strangest paradox egotism to self-annihilation.
Unselfishness
To love merely one’s own children or one’s own parents, how ridiculous that seems, how puny, how stifling! To be interested only in one’s own life or profession, to know and remain satisfied merely with one’s own circumscribed experiences – how contemptible! It is necessary to be unselfish – even extravagantly selfless – quite as much for the sake of one’s intellect and understanding as for the good of one’s heart and soul.
Undoubtedly, and dogmatically if you like, a man should be unselfish for the good of the soul and also to the credit of his intellect. To be selfish is to imprison in a tiny cage the glorious ego capable of penetrating to the farthest confines of the universe.
Solipsism
Perhaps all our knowledge and experience is a stupendous dream. Matter may be non-existent and time and space categories in which to think, as those deep and entertaining men, the philosophers, tell us.
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!
The world to me is but a dream or mock show; and we all therein but Pantalones and Anticks to my severe contemplations. This used to be a transitory impression that amused my curiosity. But it hurts and bewilders now that it has become the permanent complexion on my daily existence, when I long for real persons and real things.
Humour
When the Doctor prays for you – better call in the undertaker.
The answer was in the informative.
Madness
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.
In walking along the pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible with every stride. And if this is impossible or not easy, there arises in me a vague mental uneasiness, some subconscious suspicion that the world is not properly geometrical and that the whole universe perhaps is working out of truth.
[T]he truth is we are all mad fundamentally and are merely schooled into sanity by education.
What insane satisfaction may be got from lighting a fire! I love to let loose the tiger of fire upon a heap of sticks, I could fire the whole wood, the rick, the farmhouse, the town. It would be my revenge on inscrutable matter for being inscrutable, on beauty for not explaining herself.
I wish I could lapse into permanent insanity – ’twould be a relief to let go control and slide away down, down.
Life
Life is pain.
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.
The only real failure is one in which the victim is left spiritless, dazed, dejected with blackness all around, and within, a knife slowly and unrelentingly cutting the strings of his heart.
The real tragedies in this world are not the things which happen to us, but the things which don’t happen.
I do affirm that the most commonplace farewells for me focus the attention all at once upon the mystery and magic of our existence and separated lives. It comes as an abrupt reminder of our ignorance of the future and our dependence upon outside forces.
[I]t means pain to be a separate lonely unit, a disrupted chip of the universe.
Having lived on this planet now for the space of 24 years, I can claim with some cogency that I am qualified to express some sort of opinion about it. 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!
I am far from believing that the world is a paradise of sea-bathing and horse-exercise as R.L.S. said. That is a piece of typical Stevensonian bravura. It is a rare gymnasium to be sure. But it is also a blood-spattered abattoir, a theatre of pain, an anabasis of travail, a Calvary and a Crucifixion. But therein lies its extraordinary fascination – in those strange antitheses of comedy and tragedy, joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness.
I have been too long now in love with this wicked old earth to wish to change one jot or one tittle of it. I am loath to surrender even the Putumayo atrocities. Let me have Crippen as well as Father Damien, Heliogabalus as well as Marcus Aurelius.
It is silly to repine because Keats died young or because Poe drank himself to death. This kind of jejune lament from the people who live in garden cities soon becomes very monotonous indeed. Tragedy and comedy, I thought we were all agreed, are the warp and woof of life, and if we have agreed to accept life and accept it fully, let us stand by our compact and whoop like cowboys on the plains.
If you suffer at least you live, said Balzac. So Heine and Schubert out of their great sorrows wrote their little songs, and out of Amiel’s life of wasted opportunity came the Journal to give the lie to those who do not hold it to be as much a triumph to fail as to succeed, to despair as to win through with joy.
Every man is an island.
Truth to tell we are so completely insulated that no soul ever comes into actual contact with another. We may stand in the apposition of friendship or be bracketed together for life in holy wedlock. But true contact is never established.
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.
To live is a continuous humiliation.
Man was born with the desire to be free, yet everywhere he is in the hopeless shackles of mortality and of iron natural law.
I ask myself, “What is the secret of the universe?” and I am staggered to find that I do not know. What an amazing thing it is that no one knows.
In the embrace of this mother Sphinx the earth, my own individuality shrinks to vanishing-point, I see myself through the wrong end of a telescope – a tiny speck crawling on a great hill.
… Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the death of Rupert Brooke at Skyros in the Ægean?
Every one will concede that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance; 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.
In the lives of all of us, how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts, blind gropings – how many lost days – and man’s life is but a paltry three score years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.
What a solemn lunatic the world is.
It is not death but the dreadful possibilities of life which are so depressing.
This great bully of a universe overwhelms me.
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person – as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.
The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man’s life is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and the real – the image (or the man’s mistaken idea of himself) like an ignis fatuus leading him through devious paths into the morass of failure, or worse, of sheer laughing-stock silliness. The moral is γνωθι σεαυτόν.
Sleep
I nowhere obtained a more vivid impression of my own isolation than when walking the other evening in the country where I was staying, I turned toward home and caught sight of the little cottage up the road where I lodged. I noted the room with the open lattice window where I had been sleeping and where I was to sleep, and I considered how that at night when everything was in darkness and no one stirred all that there was of me would be found unconscious in a bed, beneath that little roof, within that small cottage which stood beneath the stars like millions of other cottages scattered over the countryside. By day I was alive and moving about, my ego was radiating forth, absorbing, soaking up my environment so that I became a larger being with a larger ego. By night I shrank to a spot. The thought made me catch my breath.
At night, I turned homewards, flushed and excited with the day’s life, going to bed unwillingly at last and even depressed because the day was at an end and I must needs put myself into a state of unconsciousness while the earth itself is never asleep, but always spins along amid the stars with its precious human freightage. To lose a single minute of conscious life in sleep seemed a real loss!
Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state – you get it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always weightily impresses me to see someone asleep – especially someone I love as to-day, stretched out as still as a log – who perhaps a few minutes ago was alive, even animated.
When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me apprehensive – this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an elaborate preparedness.
Death and the Afterlife
If there be no next world, still the Spirit of Man will have lived and uttered its protest.
… 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 micro-organism – 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. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am 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.
Better surely to die spluttering beneath a pile of vain hopes than with the sickly imperturbable smile of the comfortable person. It is better to have hoped in vain than never to have hoped at all.
What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past – if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness!
It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I hope for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.
I am happy to think that, like a pilot hard aport, Death is ready at a signal to conduct me over this moaning bar to still deep waters.
A profound compassion for my dear ones and friends, and all humanity left on the shore of this world struggling, fills my heart. I want to say genially and persuasively to them as my last testament: Why not die? What loneliness under the stars!
… Death, a way out of Time and Space.
God and Religion
In many respects it seems to be beneath God’s dignity to be omniscient.
You must not think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say), – I should hate not to be taken for an infidel – and you must not be surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should believe in a Gospel of Love.
I never had till recently any religious sense at all. I was a little sceptic before I knew it. With no one to direct me, I had a nose for agnostic literature, and when I found Haeckel and Hume I whooped with satisfaction. “I thought so,” I said to myself.
Nature and Naturalists
In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice.
Nature wastes a thousand seeds, experiments lightly with whole civilisations, and has abandoned a thousand planets that cycle in space forgotten and cold.
Under the lens of scientific analysis, natural beauty disappears. The emotion of beauty and the spirit of analysis and dissection cannot exist contemporaneously. The sunset becomes waves of light impinging on atmospheric dust; the most beautiful pearl, the encysted itch of a mollusc.
Authors and Books
Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate – ill! So am I. Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! 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 1884. I was born in 1889.
Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.
Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And I am sure that the match which fired the gun-powder was the discovery of the de Goncourts’ Journal! It’s extraordinary how I have been going on from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the heart’s desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have died unconscious that the de Goncourts had ever lived and written their colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I have finished it – a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die before having ever been in love – to die and never to have been in love! – for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.
It was James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist – a book which the mob will take fifty years to discover, but having once discovered it will again neglect.
Then I read Joyce. An amazing book. Just the book I intended to write – had started it, in fact, when the crash came. He gives the flow of the boy’s consciousness – rather the trickle of one thing after another – almost as well as Bashkirtseff. I have never read anything so extraordinary as the latter’s pages wherein she plumbs to the bottom and the dregs of current consciousness. Her brain runs synchronously with her pen. She eviscerates her current thoughts and records them exactly with a current pen.
Am reading another of James Joyce’s – Ulysses – running serially in that exotic periodical, The Little Review, which announces on its cover that it makes “no compromise with the public taste.” Ulysses is an interesting development. Damn! it’s all my idea, the technique I projected. According to the reviews, Dorothy Richardson’s Tunnel is a novel in the same manner – intensive, netting in words the continuous flow of consciousness and semi-consciousness.
Diarists and Diaries
For the diarist, the most commonplace things of daily life are of absorbing interest. Each day, the diarist finds himself born into a world as strange and beautiful as the dead world of the day before. The diarist lives on the globe for all the world as if he lodged on the slopes of a mountain, and unlike most mountain dwellers, he never loses his sense of awe at his situation. Life is vivid to him.
The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that flow thro’ the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may be, plenty of things escape him and in any event re-collection is not re-creation….
The diarist is a sentimentalist in love with his past, however painful or unprofitable it may have been. Better than any man he knows how that silent artist, the memory, working in the depths, ceaselessly fashions our perhaps dreary or commonplace existence, until the sea one day casts up its beautiful shells, and we are delighted and surprised to find our lives have been so beautiful.
Music
I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health. 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 thro’ him.
War
We may weep for our own sorrows or those of immediate friends, and even (if we have the goodwill) try in imagination to multiply that grief by millions (as if grief were arithmetic!), yet we should still be far from even a crude realisation of the collective horrors of the war – our souls are too small, too circumscribed and petty. If man had what Shelley called the Creative Faculty to imagine what they know – wars would cease.
The War is everything: it is noble, filthy, great, petty, degrading, inspiring, ridiculous, glorious, mad, bad, hopeless yet full of hope.
The Bishops are very preoccupied just now in justifying the ways of God to man. I presume it an even harder task to justify the ways of man to God.
[A] good cinema film of all the worst and most filthy and disgusting side of the war – everyone squeamish and dainty-minded to attend under State compulsion to have their necks scruffed, their sensitive nose-tips pitched into it, and their rest on lawny couches disturbed for a month after – would do as much to prevent future wars as any League of Nations.
The Past
I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?
I regret I was not alive in the days of ancient Rome. To have been non-existent and unconsidered in such great affairs stings me sharply!
I am piqued because I was not a witness of the gambollings of Dinosaurs and Pterodactyls. Yet I lay unthought of in the womb of a mother whose species was still unevolved. God does not appear to have taken me into consideration at all!
The Future
… I should like to be alive continuously – now that I have at length a footing in this ramshackle world – to watch developments, to see revolutions and evolutions, above all the climax, whatever that may be. I am glad to have been alive, to have known how the Titanic went down and how Scott died in the Antarctic. I am happy at the thought that I have lived to see men fly like birds over the country and to read the poems of Francis Thompson. We live in extremely interesting times, but how will things fadge in the future? When will socialism come? What will biology do with evolution? Who will be the next world-genius? Yet in a little while I know I shall be dead and probably as unconscious and unconsidered as before – a heap of ashes within four rotten planks.
It may be that ultimately all speculation and belief will become extinguished by one universal certainty. Man’s mind that animates this globe may continue to ripen and develop into complete knowledge able to wing its way throughout the universe. Mental telepathy will dispense with our present clumsy means of intercourse; the Spiritualists perhaps, will investigate the next world as exactly as the scientific men will have done this; all disease be vanquished and all perfection attained by easy miracles (vide the Christian Scientists), and even God Himself a familiar figure walking abroad upon the earth, the well-pleased captain of the planet. In other words, a cosmic enterprise brought to a thoroughly successful conclusion by the triumph of infinite mind over matter.
At the present rapid rate of accumulation, the time must come when the British Museum, thousands of years hence, will occupy an area as large as London and the “Encyclopædia Britannica” be housed in a building as big as the Crystal Palace: an accumulation of learning to make Aristotle and Scaliger turn pale.
Modern civilisation can never be extinguished by anything less than a secular cataclysm or a new Ice Age. You cannot analogise the Minoan civilisation which has clean vanished. The world now is bigger than Crete, and its history henceforward will be a continuous development without any such lacuna as that between Ancient Greece and our Elizabethans.
We are now entered on the kingless republican era. The next struggle, in some ways more bitter and more protracted than this, will be between capital and labour. After that, the millennium of Mr Wells and the Spiritistic age. After the aeroplane, the soul. Few yet realise what a transformation awaits the patient investigations of the psychical researchers. We know next to nothing about the mind force and spirit workings of man. But there will be a tussle with hoary old materialists like Edward Clodd.
Other Worlds
Perhaps on some other planet mortality may have had more luck. There are, peradventure, happy creatures somewhere in this great universe who generate their own light like glow-worms, or can see in the dark like owls, or who have wings like birds.
Suppose a man with the swiftness of light touring through the darkness and cold of this great universe. He would pass through innumerable solar systems and discover plenty of pellets (like this earth, each surging with waves of struggling life, like worms in carrion). And he would tour onwards like this for ever and ever. There would be no end to it, and always he would be discovering more hot suns, more cold and blasted moons, and more pellets, and each pellet would be in an internal fatuous dance of revolutions, the life on it blind and ignorant of all other life outside its own atmosphere.
Valedictory
You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless, paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.
Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new threepenny bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God that I am not as some other men are.
I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I shall be content to die.