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. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass. “The things immediate to be done,” says Thoreau, “I could give them all up to hear this locust sing.” All my energies become immobilised, even my self-expression frustrated. I could not exactly master and describe how I feel during such moments.
for conjecture, theory, research, and just that combination of all three which would suit my taste and capacity if I had time for a Monograph.
Johnson v. Yves Delage
I expect we have all of us at one time or another heard ourselves addressing to annoying, objectionable acquaintances some such stinging castigation as Hazlitt’s letter to Gifford, or Burke’s letter to a Noble Lord, or Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield, or Rousseau’s letter to the Archbishop of Paris. If only I could indulge myself! At this moment I could glut my rancours on six different persons at least!
What a raging discontent I have suffered today! What cynicism, what bitterness of spirit, what envy, hate, exasperation, childish petulance, what pusillanimous feelings and desires, what crude efforts to flout simple, ingenuous folk with my own thwarted, repressed self-assertiveness!
A solemn fellow told me he had heard from Johnson who said he had already had much success from collecting in moss.14 With an icy politeness I asked who Johnson was. Who the Hell is Johnson? As a quid pro quo I began to talk of Yves Delage, which left him as much in the dark as he left me. Our Gods differ, we have a different hierarchy.
“Well, how’s your soul?” said R⸺, bursting in with a sardonic smile.
I gave him a despairing look and said:
“Oh! a pink one with blue spots,” and he left me to my fate.
Had tea with the ⸻ and was amazed to find on the music tray in the drawing-room of these inoffensive artists a copy of ⸻’s Memoir on Synapta. Within his hearing, I said, “Did you and Mrs. ⸻ find this exciting reading?” And I held it up with a sneer. I felt I had laid bare a nerve and forthwith proceeded to make it twinge. ⸻, of course, was glib with an explanation, yet the question remains incalculable—just how pleased that young man is with himself.
After tea went out into the Studio and watched these two enthusiasts paint. I must have glowered at them. I—the energetic, ambitious, pushing youth—of necessity sitting down doing nought, as unconsidered as a child playing on the floor. I recollected my early days in my attic laboratory and sighed. Where is my energy now?
Mrs. ⸻ plays Chopin divinely well. How I envied this man—to have a wife play you Chopin!
It is fortunate I am ill in one way for I need not make my mind up about this War. I am not interested in it—this filth and lunacy. I have not yet made up my mind about myself. I am so steeped in myself—in my moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to stand clear of the data, to marshal and classify the multitude of facts and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to know—if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God’s name am I? A fool, of course, to start with—but the rest of the diagnosis?
One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing matters, provided the tongue is not furred. I have coquetted with death for so long now, and endured such prodigious ill-health that my main idea when in a fair state of repair is to seize the passing moment and squeeze it dry. The thing that counts is to be drunken; as Baudelaire says, “One must be forever drunken; that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease.”
Another feature is my insatiable curiosity. My purpose is to move about in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I would try everything, meddle lightly with everything. Religions and philosophies I devour with a relish, Pragmatism and Bishop Berkeley and Bergson have been my favourite bagatelles in turn. My consciousness is a ragbag of things: all quips, quirks, and quillets, all excellent passes of pate, all the “obsolete curiosities of an antiquated cabinet” take my eye for a moment ere I pass on. 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! We are now only in AD 1915—surely we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the whole globe and give the ball to the Boches to play with—just as an experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch? Before I could be serious enough to fight, I should want God first to dictate to me his
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