May 29
Staying at the King’s Hotel, ⸻. Giddiness very bad. Death seems unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?
Coming down here in the train, sat in corner of the compartment, twined one leg around the other, rested my elbow on the window ledge, and gazed out helplessly at the exuberant green fields, green woods, and green hedgerows. The weather was perfect, the sun blazed down.
Certainly, I was rather sorry for myself at the thought of leaving it all. But I girded up my loins and wrapped around me for a while the mantle of a nobler sentiment; i.e. I felt sorry for the others as well—for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber wagon, for the two old maids in the same compartment with me knitting bedsocks, for the beautiful Swallows darting over the stream, for the rabbit that lopped into the fern just as we passed—they too were all leaving it.
The extent of my benign compassion startled me—it was so unexpected. Perhaps for the first time in my life I forgot all about my own miserable ambitions—I forgave the successful, the timeservers, the self-satisfied, the overweening, the gracious and condescending—all, in fact, who hitherto have been thorns in my flesh and innocently enough have goaded me to still fiercer efforts to win through. “Poor people,” I said. “Leave them alone. Let them be happy if they can.” With a submissive heart, I was ready to sit down in the rows of this world’s failures and never have thought one bitter word about success. To all those persons who in one way or another had foiled my purposes I extended a pardon with Olympian gravity, and, strangest of all, I could have melted such frosty moral rectitudes with a genuine interest in the careers of my struggling contemporaries. With perfect self-abnegation, I held out my hand to them and wished them all “God Speed.”
It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being niggardly over our lives. We are all of us “shelling out.” And we can afford to be generous, for we shall all—some early, some late—be bankrupt in the end. For my part, I’ve had a short and boisterous voyage and shan’t be sorry to get into port. I give up all my plans, all my hopes, all my loves and enthusiasms without remonstrance. I renounce all—I myself am already really dead.