1 March 1915 – 7 March 1915

I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a glassy, mesmerised face--a fainéant. How different from that extremely busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say--could that lad be I? How many hours do I waste day-dreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed and could not stop dreaming--I had not the will to shake myself down to my task.... My memories simply trooped the colour. It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves or in the selves that are to be. Then I raced thro' all sorts of future possibilities--oh! when and how is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man above all should possess the "quiet mind in all changes of fortune"--Sir Henry Wotton's How happy is he born and taught. The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible. Consequently plenty of waste and fever and--as I might have discovered earlier for myself--success almost out of the question. If only I were pure-bred science or pure-bred art!

Life is a dream and we are all somnambuloes. 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! I sit here writing this--a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I? "A soap-bubble hanging from a reed." Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire--and a taste for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator--critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!--my own stupid Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole--like old Samuel again--I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways. And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech, etc.? I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul.

The Punch and Judy Show Spent a most delightful half-an-hour to-day reading an account in the Encyclopædia Britannica (one of my favourite books--it's so "gey disconnekkit") the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It's a delightful bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, "Rejoice with me--see what I have got here." I fired it off first in detail at ----; and H---- and D---- will probably be my victims to-morrow. After all, it is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope 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.