22 March 1915 – 28 March 1915

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 mort-main. 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.

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 to-day! 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. 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 for ever 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 A.D. 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 A.D. 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 programme of the future of mankind.

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: (1) The respectable youth. (2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic. (3) 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 to-day 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.