December 9
It’s a fearful strain to go on endeavouring to live up to time with a carefully laid-out timetable of future achievements. I am hurrying on with my study of Italian in order to read the Life of Spallanzani in order to include him in my book—to be finished by the end of next year; I am also subsidising Jenkinson’s embryological lectures at University College with the more detailed account of practical and experimental work in his textbook; I have also started a lengthy research upon the Trichoptera—all with a horrible sense of time fleeing swiftly and opportunities for work too few ever to be squandered, and, in the background, behind all this feverish activity, the black shadow that I might die suddenly with nothing done—next year, next month, next week, tomorrow, now!
Then sometimes, as tonight, I have misgivings. Shall I do these things so well now as I might once have done them? Has not my ill-health seriously affected my mental powers? Surely the boy of 1908–10 was almost a genius or—seen at this distance—a very remarkable youth in the fanatical zeal with which he sought to pursue, and succeeded in gaining, his own end of a zoological education for himself.
It is a terrible suspicion to cross the mind of an ambitious youth that perhaps, after all, he is a very commonplace mortal—that his life, whether comedy or tragedy, or both, or neither, is anyway insignificant, of no account.
It is still more devastating for him to have to consider whether the laurel wreath was not once within his grasp, and whether he must not ascribe his own incalculable loss to his stomach simply.