My life is filled with _self_.
If my soul could awaken fully perhaps I might be lifted out of
myself--surely I should be. But my soul is not awake. It is
awakening, trying to open its eyes; and it is crying out blindly
after something, but it can not _know_. I have a dreadful feeling
that it will stay always like this.
Oh, I feel everything--everything! I feel what might be. And there
is Nothing. There are six tooth-brushes.
Would I stop for a few fine distinctions, a theory, a natural law
even, to escape from this into Happiness--or into something greatly
less?
Misery--misery! If only I could feel it less!
Oh, the weariness, the weariness--as I await the Devil’s coming.
February 8.
Often I walk out to a place on the flat valley below the town, to
flirt with Death. There is within me a latent spirit of coquetry,
it appears.
Down on the flat there is a certain deep, dark hole with several
feet of water at the bottom.
This hole completely fascinates me. Sometimes when I start out
to walk in a quite different direction, I feel impelled almost
irresistibly to turn and go down on the flat in the direction of
the fascinating, deep black hole.
And here I flirt with Death. The hole is so narrow--only about four
feet across--and so dark, and so deep! I don’t know whether it was
intended to be a well, or whether it is an abandoned shaft of some
miner. At any rate it is isolated and deserted, and it has a rare
loving charm for me.
I go there sometimes in the early evening, and kneel on the edge
of it and lean over the dark pit, with my hand grasping a wooden
stake that is driven into the ground near by. And I drop little
stones down and hear them splash hollowly, and it sounds a long
way off.
There is something wonderfully soothing, wonderfully comforting
to my unrestful, aching wooden heart in the dark mystery of this
fascinating hole. Here is the End for me, if I want it--here is
the Ceasing, when I want it. And I lean over and smile quietly.
“No flowers,” I say softly to myself, “no weeping idiots, no
senseless funeral, no oily undertaker fussing over my woman’s-body,
no useless Christian prayers. Nothing but this deep dark restful
grave.”
No one would ever find it. It is a mile and a half from any house.
The water--the dark still water at the bottom--would gurgle over
me and make an end quickly. Or if I feared there was not enough
water, I would bring with me a syringe and some morphine and
inject an immense quantity into one white arm, and kneel over the
tender darkness until my youth-weary, waiting-worn senses should
be overcome, and my slim, light body should fall. It would splash
into the water at the bottom--it would follow the little stones
at last. And the black, muddy water would soak in and begin the
destroying of my body, and murky bubbles would rise so long as my
lungs continued to breathe. Or perhaps my body would fall against
the side of the hole, and the head would lie against it out of the
water. Or perhaps only the face would be out of the water, turned
upward to the light above--or turned half-down, and the hair would
be darkly wet and heavy, and the face would be blue-white below
it, and the eyes would sink inward.
“The End, the End!” I say softly and ecstatically. Yet I do not
lean farther out. My hand does not loosen its tight grasp on the
wooden stake. I am only flirting with Death now.
Death is fascinating--almost like the Devil. Death makes use of
all his arts and wiles, powerful and alluring, and flirts with
deadly temptation for me. And I make use of my arts and wiles--and
tempt him.
Death would like dearly to have me, and I would like dearly to have
him. It is a flirtation that has its source in mutual desire. We
do not love each other, Death and I,--we are not friends. But we
desire each other sensually, lustfully.
Sometime I suppose I shall yield to the desire. I merely play at
it now--but in an unmistakable manner. Death knows it is only a
question of time.
But first the Devil must come. First the Devil, then Death: a deep
dark soothing grave--and the early evening, “and a little folding
of the hands to sleep.”
February 12.
I am in no small degree, I find, a sham--a player to the gallery.
Possibly this may be felt as you read these analyses.
While all of these emotions are written in the utmost seriousness
and sincerity, and are exactly as I feel them, day after day--so far
as I have the power to express what I feel--still I aim to convey
through them all the idea that I am lacking in the grand element
of Truth--that there is in the warp and woof of my life a thread
that is false--false.
I don’t know how to say this without the fear of being misunderstood.
When I say I am in a way a sham, I have no reference to the truths
as I have given them in this Portrayal, but to a very light and
subtle thing that runs through them.
Oh, do not think for an instant that this analysis of my emotions
is not perfectly sincere and real, and that I have not felt all
of them more than I can put into words. They are my tears--my
life-blood!
But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness
and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me
and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.
I have not succeeded thoroughly in analyzing this--it is so thin,
so elusive, so faint--and yet not little. It is a natural thing
enough viewed in the light of my other traits.
I have lived my nineteen years buried in an environment at utter
variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never
touched, and my sympathies very rarely, if ever, appealed to. I never
disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. Never, that is
to say, to any one except my one friend, the anemone lady.--And so
every day of my life I am playing a part; I am keeping an immense
bundle of things hidden under my cloak. When one has played a part--a
false part--all one’s life, for I was a sly, artful little liar
even in the days of five and six; then one is marked. One may never
rid oneself of the mantle of falseness, charlatanry--particularly
if one is innately a liar.
A year ago when the friendship of my anemone lady was given me, and
she would sometimes hear sympathetically some long-silent bit of
pain, I felt a snapping of tense-drawn cords, a breaking away of
flood-gates--and a strange, new pain. I felt as if I must clasp her
gentle hand tightly and give way to the pent-up, surging tears of
eighteen years. I had wanted this tender thing more than anything
else all my life, and it was given me suddenly.