For days past have been living in a state of mental ebullition. All kinds of pictures of Love, Life, and Death have been passing through my mind. Now I am too indolent and nerveless to set them down. Physically I am such a wreck that to carry out the least intention, such as putting on my boots, I have to flog my will like an Arab with a slave “in a sand of Ayaman.” Three months ago when I got up before breakfast to dissect rabbits, dogfish, frogs, newts, etc., this would have seemed impossible.
or ankle underneath the skirt—all these in Hardy signify the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. They are the susurrus of the breeze before the storm, and you await what is to follow with palpitating heart.
Still visit Dr. ⸻’s surgery each week. I have two dull spots at the bottom of each lung. What a fine expressive word is gloom. Let me write it: gloom. …
One evening coming home in the train from L⸺ County Sessions I noticed a horrible, wheezy sound whenever I breathed deep. I was scared out of my life, and at once thought of consumption. Went to the Doctor’s next day, and he sounded me and reassured me. I was afraid to tell him of the little wheezy sound at the apex of each lung, and I believed he overlooked it. So next day, very harassed, I went back to him again and told him. He hadn’t noticed it and looked glum. Have to keep out of doors as much as possible.
The intense internal life I lead, worrying about my health, reading (eternally reading), reflecting, observing, feeling, loving and hating—with no outlet for superfluous steam, cramped and confined on every side, without any friends or influence of any sort, without even any acquaintances excepting my colleagues in journalism (whom I contemn)—all this will turn me into the most self-conscious, conceited, mawkish, gauche creature in existence.
The facts are undeniable: Life is pain. No sophistry can win me over to any other view. And yet years ago I set out so hopefully and healthfully—what are birds’ eggs to me now? My ambition is enormous but vague. I am too distributed in my abilities ever to achieve distinction.
Had a letter from the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, advising me of three vacancies in his Dept., and asking me if I would like to try, etc. … So that Dr. ⸻’s visit to me bore some fruit.3 Spent the morning daydreaming. … Perhaps this is the flood tide at last! I shall work like a dray horse to pull through if I am nominated. … I await developments in a frightfully turbulent state of mind. I have a frantic desire to control the factors which are going to affect my future so permanently. And this ferocious desire, of course, collides with a crash all day long with the fact that however much I desire there will still remain the unalterable logic of events.
… How delicious all this seemed! To be alive—thinking, seeing, enjoying, walking, eating—all quite apart from the amount of money in your purse or the prospects of a career. I revelled in the sensuous enjoyment of my animal existence.
Up to now my life has been one of great internal strife and struggle—the struggle with a great ambition and a weak will—unequal to the task of coping with it. 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.
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.
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.
My egoism appals me. Likewise the extreme intensification of the consciousness of myself. Whenever I walk down the High Street on a market day, my self-consciousness magnifies my proportions to the size of a Gulliver—so that it is grievous to reflect that in spite of that the townsfolk see me only as an insignificant bourgeois youth who reports meetings in shorthand.
We sang tonight in Church, “But when I know Thee as Thou art, I’ll praise Thee as I ought.” Exactly! Till then, farewell. We are a great little people, we humans. If there be no next world, still the Spirit of Man will have lived and uttered its protest.
Our Simian Ancestry
How I hate the man who talks about the “brute creation,” with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. 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 do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little sorrow. I hate the time
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