September 28
Having lived on this planet now for the space of twenty-four years, I can claim with some cogency that I am qualified to express some sort of opinion about it. I therefore hereby record that I find myself in an absorbingly interesting place where I live, move and have my being, dominated by one monstrous feature above all others—the mystery of it all! Everything is so astonishing, my own existence so incredible!
Nothing explains itself. Everyone is dumb. It is like walking about at a masqued Ball. … Even I myself am a mystery to me. How wonderful and frightening that is—to feel yourself—your innermost and most substantial possession to be a mystery, incomprehensible. I look at myself in the mirror and mock at myself. On some days I am to myself as strange and unfamiliar as a Pterodactyl. There is a certain grim humour in finding myself here possessed of a perfectly arbitrary arrangement of lineaments when I never asked to be here and never selected my own attributes. To the dignity of a human being it seems like a coarse practical joke. … My own freakish physique is certainly a joke.