March 3
I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a glassy, mesmerised face—a fainéant. How different from that extremely busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say—could that lad be I? How many hours do I waste daydreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed and could not stop dreaming—I had not the will to shake myself down to my task. … My memories simply trooped the colour.
It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves or in the selves that are to be.
Then I raced through all sorts of future possibilities—oh! when and how is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man above all should possess the “quiet mind in all changes of fortune” —Sir Henry Wotton’s “How Happy Is He Born and Taught.”
The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible. Consequently plenty of waste and fever and—as I might have discovered earlier for myself—success almost out of the question. If only I were purebred science or purebred art!