Half inevitably, half by choice, I write this book now.
I am at a lowering impatient shoulder-shrugging life-point where I
must express myself or lose myself or break.
And I am quite alone as I live my life.
And I am unhappy--a scornful unhappiness not of bitter positive grief
which admits of engulfing luxuries of sorrow, but of muffled unrests
and tortures of knowing I fit in nowhere, that I drift--drift--and it
brings an unbearable dread, always more and more dread, into days and
into wakeful nights.
And writing it turns the brunt of it a little away from me.
And to write is the thing I most love to do.
And I myself am the most immediate potent topic I can find in my
knowledge to write on: the biggest, the littlest, the broadest, the
narrowest, the loveliest, the hatefulest, the most colorful, the most
drab, the most mystic, the most obvious, and the one that takes me
farthest as a writer and as a person.
I write myself when I write the thoughts smouldering in me whether
they be of Death, of Roses, of Christ’s Mother, of Ten-penny Nails.
One’s thoughts are one’s most crucial adventures. Seriously and
strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more
exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.
I unfold myself in accursed and precious written thoughts. I cast the
reflections of my inner selves on the paper from the insolent mirror
of my Mind.
--my Mind--it is so free--
My Soul is not free: God hung a string of curses, like a little
manacling chain, round its neck long and long ago. Always I feel it.
My Heart is not free for it is dead: in a listless way and a trivial
way, dead. And my Body--it is free but has a seeming of something
wasted and useless like a dinner spread out on a table uneaten and
growing cold.
--but my free Mind--
Though I were shut fast in a prison: though I were strapped in an
electric chair: though I were gnawed and decayed by leprosy: I
still could _think_, with thoughts free as gold-drenched outer air,
thoughts delicate-luminous as young dawn, thoughts facile, seductive,
speculative, artful, evil, sly, sublime.
You might cut off my two hands: but you could not keep me from
remembering the Sad Gray Loveliness of the Sea when the Rain beats,
beats, beats upon it.
You might admonish me by driving a red-hot spike between my two white
shoulders: but you could not by that influence my Thoughts--you could
not so much as change their current.
I am intently aware of my Mind from moment to moment--all the passing
life-moments. The awareness is a troubled power, a heavy burden and a
wild enchantment.--
Also what I feel I write.
I am my own law, my own oracle, my own one intimate friend, my own
guide though I guide me to dead-walls, my own mentor, my own foe, my
own lover.
I am in age one-and-thirty, a smouldering-flamed period which
feels the wings of the Youth-bird beating strong and violent for
flight--half-ready to fly away.
I am not a charming person. Quite seventy singly-used adjectives
would better fit me.
But I have some charm of youth, and a charm of sex, and a charm of
intellect and intuition, and some charms of personality.
I have a perfervid appreciation of those things in other persons. And
my steel has sometime struck fire from their flint.
But always my steel has turned back drearily yet strongly to itself.
_A twisted moral_