I wish this Portrayal to be published and launched into that deep
salt sea--the world. There are some there surely who will understand
it and me.
Can I be that thing which I am--can I be possessed of a peculiar
rare genius, and yet drag out my life in obscurity in this uncouth,
warped, Montana town?
It must be impossible! If I thought the world contained nothing more
than that for me--oh, what should I do? Would I make an end of my
dreary little life now? I fear I would. I am a philosopher--and a
coward. And it were infinitely better to die now in the high-beating
pulses of youth than to drag on, year after year, year after year,
and find oneself at last a stagnant old woman, spiritless, hopeless,
with a declining body, a declining mind,--and nothing to look back
upon except the visions of things that might have been--and the
weariness.
I see the picture. I see it plainly. Oh, kind Devil, deliver me
from it!
Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things
something among them for me. And always, while I am still young,
there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim
light, and ofttimes there’s a treachery in it.
January 15.
So then, yes. I find myself at this stage of womankind and nineteen
years, a genius, a thief, a liar--a general moral vagabond, a fool
more or less, and a philosopher of the peripatetic school. Also I
find that even this combination can not make one happy. It serves,
however, to occupy my versatile mind, to keep me wondering what it
is a kind Devil has in store for me.
A philosopher of my own peripatetic school--hour after hour I walk
over the desolate sand and dreariness among tiny hills and gulches
on the outskirts of this mining town; in the morning, in the long
afternoon, in the cool of the night. And hour after hour, as I walk,
through my brain some long, long pageants march: the pageant of my
fancies, the pageant of my unparalleled egotism, the pageant of my
unhappiness, the pageant of my minute analyzing, the pageant of
my peculiar philosophy, the pageant of my dull, dull life,--and
the pageant of the Possibilities.
We three go out on the sand and barrenness: my wooden heart, my
good young woman’s-body, my soul. We go there and contemplate the
long sandy wastes, the red, red line on the sky at the setting of
the sun, the cold gloomy mountains under it, the ground without a
weed, without a grass-blade even in their season--for they have
years ago been killed off by the sulphur smoke from the smelters.
So this sand and barrenness forms the setting for the personality
of me.
January 16.