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:
The respectable youth.
The foul-mouthed commentator and critic.
The real but unknown I.
Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same tenement!
In a Crowd
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. Some poor devils suffocating and unable any longer to bear the strain will shout, “Bravo,” or “Hear, hear,” at every opportunity. At the feeblest joke we all laugh loudly, welcoming this means of self-survival. Hence the success of the Salvation Army. To be preached at and prayed for in the mass for long on end is what human nature can’t endure in silence and a good deal of self can be smuggled by an experienced Salvationist into “Alleluia” or “The Lord be praised.”
Naming Cockroaches
I had to determine the names of some exotic cockroaches today and finding it very difficult and dull raised a weak smile in two enthusiasts who know them as “Blattids” by rechristening them with great frivolity, “Fat ’eds.”
“These bloody insects,” I said to an Australian entomologist of rare quality.
“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.
A Test of Happiness
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.
I do wonder where I shall end up; what shall I be twenty years hence? It alarms me to find I am capable of such remarkable changes in character. I am fluid and can be poured into any mould. I have moments when I see in myself the most staggering possibilities. I could become a wife beater, and a drug-taker (especially the last). My curiosity is often such a ridiculous weakness that I have found myself playing Peeping Tom and even spying into private documents. In a railway carriage I will twist my neck and risk any rudeness to see the title of the book my neighbour is reading or how the letter she is reading begins.
“Why,” asks Samuel Butler, “should not chicken be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient … it is not only not perfect but so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes. …”
As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bathe, dress, shave, breakfast once for all, if we could “cut” these monotonous cycles of routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we were immortal!—how much forrarder we should all get—always at the heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of labour in front!
Two People I hate in particular
The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to pass under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars.
The woman on the bus the other night—pouring out an interminable flow of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man—poor, exhausted devil who kept answering dreamily “Oom” and “Yes” and “Oom”—how I hated her for his sake!
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
If music moves me, it always generates images—a procession of apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude, terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears and arms bent at the elbows—a staring, bulgy-eyed madwoman such as one sees in Raemakers’ cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the struggle of a man with a steam-hammer—Fate. As though through the walls of a closed room—some mysterious room, a fearful spot—I crouch and listen and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out—there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike blows—melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what has happened), and the
