I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things
because of that wretched, lonely childhood.
There will always be a lacking, a wanting--some dead branches that
never grew leaves.
It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life
tragedy.
It is Nothing that makes life tragedy.
It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing.
It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.
January 26.
I sit at my window and look out upon the housetops and chimneys of
Butte. As I look I have a weary, disgusted feeling.
People are abominable creatures.
Under each of the roofs live a man and woman joined together by that
very slender thread, the marriage ceremony--and their children,
the result of the marriage ceremony.
How many of them love each other? Not two in a hundred, I warrant.
The marriage ceremony is their one miserable, petty, paltry excuse
for living together.
This marriage rite, it appears, is often used as a cloak to cover
a world of rather shameful things.
How virtuous these people are, to be sure, under their different
roof-trees. So virtuous are they indeed that they are able to draw
themselves up in the pride of their own purity, when they happen
upon some corner where the marriage ceremony is lacking. So virtuous
are they that the men can afford to find amusement and diversion
in the woes of the corner that is without the marriage rite; and
the women may draw away their skirts in shocked horror and wonder
that such things can be, in view of their own spotless virtue.
And so they live on under the roofs, and they eat and work and sleep
and die; and the children grow up and seek other roofs, and call
upon the marriage ceremony even as their parents before them--and
then they likewise eat and work and sleep and die; and so on world
without end.
This also is life--the life of the good, virtuous Christians.
I think, therefore, that I should prefer some life that is not
virtuous.
I shall never make use of the marriage ceremony. I hereby register
a vow, Devil, to that effect.
When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is
marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman
live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make
it marriage. The woman who does this need not feel the tiniest bit
better than her lowest sister in the streets. Is she not indeed
a step lower since she pretends to be what she is not--plays the
virtuous woman? While the other unfortunate pretends nothing. She
wears her name on her sleeve.
If I were obliged to be one of these I would rather be she who
wears her name on her sleeve. I certainly would. The lesser of two
evils, always.
I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the
paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who
is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her;
who wears the man’s name, who bears the man’s children--who plays
the virtuous woman. There are too many such in the world now.
May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that
deformed monstrosity--a virtuous woman.
Anything, Devil, but that.
And so, as I look out over the roofs and chimneys, I have a weary,
disgusted feeling.
January 27.
This is not a diary. It is a Portrayal. It is my inner life shown
in its nakedness. I am trying my utmost to show everything--to
reveal every petty vanity and weakness, every phase of feeling,
every desire. It is a remarkably hard thing to do, I find, to probe
my soul to its depths, to expose its shades and half-lights.
Not that I am troubled with modesty or shame. Why should one be
ashamed of anything?
But there are elements in one’s mental equipment so vague, so
opaque, so undefined--how is one to grasp them? I have analyzed and
analyzed, and I have gotten down to some extremely fine points--yet
still there are things upon my own horizon that go beyond me.
There are feelings that rise and rush over me overwhelmingly. I am
helpless, crushed, and defeated, before them. It is as if they were
written on the walls of my soul-chamber in an unknown language.
My soul goes blindly seeking, seeking, asking. Nothing answers.
I cry out after some unknown Thing with all the strength of my
being; every nerve and fiber in my young woman’s-body and my young
woman’s-soul reaches and strains in anguished unrest. At times as I
hurry over my sand and barrenness all my life’s manifold passions
culminate in utter rage and woe. Waves of intense, hopeless longing
rush over me and envelop me round and round. My heart, my soul, my
mind go wandering--wandering; ploughing their way through darkness
with never a ray of light; groping with helpless hands; asking,
longing, wanting things: pursued by a Demon of Unrest.