December 1
Renewed my cold—I do nothing all day but blow my nose, cough, and curse Austin Harrison.
M⸺ thinks the lungs are all right. “There is nothing there, I think,” said he, this morning. Alleluia! I’ve had visions of consumption for weeks past and M⸺ himself has been expecting it. I always just escape: I always almost get something, do something, go somewhere, I have dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright—but only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of some incurable disorder. Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis, I’ve only been Jones with dyspepsia. So, too, in other directions, big events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in giving up newspaper journalism and breaking through that steel environment—but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success in an Essay in the Academy, which attracted attention—a debut, however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived. It is always not quite.
Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the Furniture Record seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I received him ironically—but little did he understand.
I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of Economic Entomology! Curse. … Why can’t I either have a first-rate disease or be a first-rate zoologist?
Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught himself prodigious embryology out of F. M. Balfour’s Textbook, who had cut sections of fowls’ eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim’s Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a coelomic duct without turning a hair—or the phylogenetic history (how absorbing!) of the kidney—pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and all the ducts! … All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won knowledge wrenched away is never brought into use—it lies piled up in my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative anatomist.