November 19 + 

I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of self-commiseration⁠—my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot get warm⁠—try as I will. + 

My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are permanently cold. My right hand is blue⁠—though I’ve shut up the window and piled up a roaring fire. It’s Antarctic cold and desolation. London in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I marvel how God can stick it⁠—lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That is how I live too⁠—but then I am not God. + 

I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it would take a lot to make me forget myself). So I plunge into these literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens’ Blue-black Ink. It gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know.⁠ ⁠… + 

It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease would act as a stimulus⁠—I could strike an attitude feverishly and be histrionic. But to be merely “below par”⁠—to feel like a Bunny rabbit perennially “poorly,” saps my character and mental vigour. I want to crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They suspect him, something fishy. + 