October 12 + 

It is winter⁠—no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with its big iron bar carrying pothook and hanger. E⁠⸺ knits warm garments for the Baby, and I play Chopin, César Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice (with variations) on a mouth-organ, called “The Angels’ Choir,” and made in Germany.⁠ ⁠… You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless, paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence. + 

Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new threepenny bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God that I am not as some other men are. + 

I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I shall be content to die. + 