8 May 1911 – 14 May 1911

Staying by the Sea I have been living out of doors a lot lately and am getting sunburnt. It gives me infinite pleasure to be sunburnt--to appear the man of the open air, the open road, and the wild life. The sun intoxicates me to-day. The sea is not big enough to hold me nor the sky for me to breathe in. I feel I should like to be swaying with all the passions, throbbing with life and a vast activity of heart and sinew--to live magnificently--with an unquenchable thirst to drink to the lees, to plumb the depth of every joy and every sorrow, to see my life flash in the heat. Ah! Youth! Youth! Youth!!! In these moments of ecstasy my happiness is torrential. I have the soul of the poppy flaming in me then. I am rather like the poppy in many ways.... It is peculiarly appropriate. It must be my flower! I am the poppy!!

L---- was digging up the ground in his garden to-day 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 some one dies, he is sure to be some one 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. 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.