It soothes my vanity.
When you read this Portrayal you will admire me. You will surely
have to admire me.
And so this is life, and everything matters.
But just now I will stop writing and go downstairs to my dinner.
There is a porterhouse steak, broiled rare, and some green young
onions. Oh, they are good! And when one is to have a porterhouse
steak for one’s dinner--and some green young onions, one doesn’t
give a tupenny dam whether anything else matters or not.
March 19.
On a day when the sky is like lead and a dull, tempestuous wilderness
of gray clouds adds a dreariness to the sand, there is added to
the loneliness of my life a deep bitterness of gall and wormwood.
Out of my bitterness it is easy for bad to come.
Surely Badness is a deep black pool wherein one may drown dullness
and Nothingness.
I do not know Badness well. It is something material that seems
a great way off now, but that might creep nearer and nearer as I
became less and less young.
But now when the day is of the leaden dullness I look at Badness
and long for it. I am young and all alone, and everything that is
good is beyond my reach. But all that is bad--surely that is within
the reach of every one.
I wish for a long pageant of bad things to come and whirl and rage
through this strange leaden life of mine and break the spell.
Why should it not be Badness instead of Death? Death, it seems,
will bring me but a change of agony. Badness would perhaps so crowd
my life with its vivid phenomena that they would act as a neurotic
to the racked nerves of my Nothingness. It would be an outlet--and
possibly I could forget some things.
I think just now of a woman who lived long ago and in whom the
world at large seems not to have found anything admirable. I mean
Messalina Valeria, the wife of the stupid emperor Claudius. I have
conceived a profound admiration for this historic wanton. She may
not indeed have had anything to forget; she may not have suffered.
But she had the strength of will to take what she wanted, to do as
she liked, to live as she chose to live.
It is admirable and beautiful beyond expression to sacrifice and
give up and wait for love of that good that gives in itself a just
reward. And only next to this is the throwing to the winds of all
restraint when the good holds itself aloof and gives nothing. We
are weak, contemptible fools who do not grasp the resources within
our reach when there is no just reward for our restraint. Why do we
not take what we want of the various temptations? It is not that
we are virtuous. It is that we are cowards.
And it is worth while to remain true to an ideal that offers only
the vaguest hopes of realization? It is not philosophy. When one has
made up one’s mind that one wants a dish of hot stewed mushrooms, and
set one’s heart on it, should one scorn a handful of raw evaporated
apples, if one were starving, for the sake of the phantom dish of
hot stewed mushrooms? Should one say, Let me starve, but I will
never descend to evaporated apples; I will have nothing but a dish
of hot stewed mushrooms? If one is sure one will have the stewed
mushrooms finally, before one dies of starvation, then very well.
One should wait for them and take nothing else.
But it is not in my good peripatetic philosophy to pass by the Badness
that the gods provide for the sake of a far-away, always-unrealized
ideal, however brilliant, however beautiful, however golden.
When the lead is in the sky and in my life, a vision of Badness looms
up on the horizon and looks at me and beckons with a fascinating
finger. Then I say to myself, What is the use of this unsullied,
struggling soul; this unbesmirched, empty heart; this treasureless,
innocent mind; this insipid maid’s-body? There are no good things
for them. But here, to be sure, are fascinating, glittering bad
things--the goods that the gods provide, the compensation of the
Devil.
Comes Death, some day, I said--but to die, in the sight of glittering
bad things--and I only nineteen! These glittering things appear
fair.
There is really nothing evil in the world. Some things appear
distorted and unnatural because they have been badly done. Had
they been perfect in conception and execution they would strike
one only with admiration at their fine, iridescent lights. You
remember Don Juan and Haidee. That, to be sure, was not evil in any
event--they loved each other. But if they had had only a passing, if
intense, fancy for one another, who would call it evil? Who would
call it anything but wonderful, charming, enchanting? The Devil’s
bad things--like the Devil’s good things--may gleam and glisten,
oh, how they may gleam and glisten! I have seen them do so, not
only in a poem of Byron’s, but in the life that is.
Always when the lead is in the sky I would like to cultivate
thoroughly this branch of the vineyard. Now doesn’t it make you
shiver to think of this dear little Mary MacLane wandering unloved
through dark by-ways and deadly labyrinths? It makes me shiver.
But it needn’t. If I am to wander unloved, why not as well wander
there as through Nothingness?
I fancy it must be wonderfully easy to become used to the many-sided
Badness. I have lived my nineteen years in the midst of Nothingness,
and I have not yet become used to it. It has sharp knives in it,
has Nothingness. Badness may have some sharp knives also--but there
are other things. Yes, there are other things.
Kind Devil, if you are not to fetch me Happiness, then slip off
from your great steel key-ring a bright little key to the door of
the glittering, gleaming bad things, and give it me, and show me
the way, and wish me joy.
I would like to live about seven years of judicious Badness, and then
Death, if you will. Nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, seven
years of judicious Badness--and then Death. A noble ambition! But
might it not be worse? If not that, then nineteen years of damnable
Nothingness, and then Death. No; when the lead is in the sky that
does not appeal to me. My versatile mind turns to the seven years
of judicious Badness.
There is nothing in the world without its element of Badness. It is
in literature; it is in every art--in pictures, sculpture, even in
music. There are certain fine, deep, minute passages in Beethoven
and in Chopin that tell of things wonderfully, sublimely bad. Chopin
one can not understand. Is there any one in the world who can
understand him? But we know at once that there is the Badness--and
it is music!
There is the element of Badness in me.
I long to cultivate my element of Badness. Badness compared to
Nothingness is beautiful. And so, then, I wait also for some one to
come over the hill with things other than Happiness. But whatever
I wait for, nothing comes.
March 20.
There were pictures in the red sunset sky to-day. I looked at them
and was racked with passions of desire. I fancied to myself that I
could have any of the good things in the pictures for the asking
and the waiting. The while I knew that when the sunset should fade
from the sky I would be overwhelmed by my heaviest woe.
There was a picture of intense peace. There were stretches of flat,
green country, and oak-trees and aspens, and a still, still lake.
In the dim distance you could see fields of wheat and timothy-grass
that moved a little as if in the wind. You could fancy the cows
feeding just below the brow of the near hills, and a hawk floating
and wheeling among the clouds. A rainbow arched over the lake.
There is nothing lacking here, I thought. “Life and health and
peace possessing.” Give me this, kind Devil.
There was a picture of endless, limitless strength. There were the
oak-trees again but bereft now of every leaf, and the bristling,
jagged rocks back of them were not more coldly staunch. The sun
poured brilliantly bright upon them. A river flowed unmoved and quiet
between yellow clay banks. A tornado might sweep over this and not
one twig would be displaced, not one ripple would come to the river.
Is it not fine! I said to myself. No feeling, no self-analysis,
no aching, no pain--and the strength of the Philistines. Oh, kind
Devil, I entreat you, let me have that!
There was a picture of untrammeled revel and forgetfulness. There
were fields of swaying daffodils and red lilies. The young shrubs
tossed their heads and were joyous. Lambs gamboled and the happy
meadow-lark knew whereof she sang.
“The winds with wonder whist
Smoothly the waters kissed.”
Be carefree, be light-hearted, be wicked--above all, forget. The
deeds are what you will; the time is now; the aftermath is nothing;
the day of reckoning is never. Love things lightly, take all that
you see, and to the winds with regret! Gracious Devil, I whispered
intensely, give me this and no other!
There was a picture of raging elements. “The winds blew, and the
rains descended and the floods came.” The sky was overcast with
rolling clouds. The air was heavy with unrest. There was a gray
stone house set upon a rocky point, and I had momentary glimpses of
an unquiet sea below it. Back on the surface of the land slender
trees were waving wildly in the gale. The wind and the rain were
saying, “Damn you, little earth, I have you now,--I will rend and
ruin you.” They whipped and raged in frenzied joy. The little earth
liked it. The elements whirled and whistled round the gray stone
house. A lurid light came from a ghastly moon between clouds. The
entire scene was desolately savage and forlorn, but attractive.
As I listened in fancy to that shrieking, wailing wind, and saw
green branches jerked and twisted asunder in the storm, my barren,
defrauded heart leaped and exulted. If I could live in the midst
of this and be beaten and shaken roughly, would not that deep
sense forget to ache? Kind Devil, pray send me some storms. It is
Nothingness that bears down heavy.
There was a picture of an exalted spiritual life. There was that
strange bright light. And the things in the picture were those things
alone in this world that are real, and the only things that count.
The old, soft green of the old, old rolling hills was the green of
love--the earth-love and the love that comes from beyond the earth.
The air and the blue water and the sunshine were so beautifully
real and true that except for their deep-reaching, passionate
tenderness human strength could not endure them. There were lanes
of climbing vines and white violets. Was it my fancy that brought
their thin fragrance to me over piles of billowy clouds? There was
something there that was old--old as the race. Those green valleys
were the same as when the mists first lifted from the earth. As I
looked my life stood still. My soul shivered faintly. As I looked I
felt nearer, my God, to thee--though I have no God and everything
is away from me, nothing tender comes to me.
Still it was nearer, my God, to thee.
A voice came out of the far, far distant ages and said very gently:
“All these shadows are falling in vain. You are blinded and bewildered
in the darkness--the darkness is deep--deep. There is not one dim
ray of light. Your feet falter and stumble. You can not see. But
the shadows are falling in vain.”