June 11
Old systems of Classification: Rafinesc’s Theory of Fives, Swainson’s Theory of Sevens, Edward Newman’s book called Sphinx Vespiformis tracing fives throughout the animal world, Sir Thomas Browne’s Quincunx, chasing fives throughout the whole of nature—in the words of Coleridge, “quincunxes in Heaven above, quincunxes in the Earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything!”
Old false trails:
The Philosopher’s Stone (Balthazar Claes).
A universal catholicon (Bishop Berkeley’s tar-water). Mystical numbers (as per above).
My father was Sir Thomas Browne and my mother Marie Bashkirtseff. See what a curious hybrid I am!
I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people and say: “There! that’s me! You may like it or lump it, but it’s true. And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite everybody’s inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm.” As we are all such worms we should at least be honest worms.
My gratitude to E⸺ for plucking me out of the hideous miseries of my life in London is greater than I can express. If I were the cheap hero of a ladies’ novel I should immolate my journals as a token, and you would have a pretty picture of a pale young man watching his days go up in smoke by the drawing-room fire. But I have more confidence in her sterling good sense, and if I cannot be loved for what I am, I do not wish to be loved for what I am not.
Since the fateful Nov. 27th, my life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I accept my fate with great content, my onetime restless ambition lies asleep now, my onetime, furious self-assertiveness is anaesthetised by this great War; the War and the discovery about my health together have plucked out of me that canker of self-obsession. I sit at home here in this country cottage in perfect isolation—flattened out by a steam hammer (though it took Armageddon to do it!), yet as cheerful and busy as a Dormouse laying up store for the winter. For I am almost resigned to the issue in the knowledge that some day, someone will know, perhaps somebody will understand and—immortal powers!—even sympathise, “the quick heart quickening from the heart that’s still.”