March 16
No one will ever understand without personal experience that an exceedingly self-conscious creature like myself driven in on himself to consume himself is the unhappiest of men. I have come to loathe myself: my finicking, hypersensitive, morbid nature, always thinking, talking, writing about myself for all the world as if the world beyond did not exist! I am rings within rings, circles concentric and intersecting, a maze, a tangle: watching myself behave or misbehave, always reflecting on what impression I am making on others or what they think of me. Introduce me to a stranger and I swell out as big as Alice. Self-consciousness makes me pneumatic, and consequently so awkward and clumsy and swollen that I don’t know how to converse—and God help the other fellow.
Later: Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions—they are too maddeningly unanswerable—let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.
In this week’s T. P.’s Weekly a youth advertises:—
“Young thinkers interested in philosophy, religion, social reform, the future of humanity, and all free thought, please communicate with ‘Evolution,’ aged twenty-one!” All right for twenty-one.
Later: I have in mind some work on the vascular system of larval newts. In the autumn I see a large piece of work to be done in animal psychology—namely, frequency of stimulus and its relation to habit formation. Yet the doctor advises long rest and the office work remains to be done. I must hack my way through somehow. I sit trying to disentangle these knots; then someone plays a dreamy waltz and all my fine edifices of the will vanish in mist. Is it worth while? Why not float with the tide? But I soon throw off these temptations. If I live, I shall play a fine game! I am determined. A lame-dog life is of no use.