{"persona": "maclane", "date": "13 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.\n\nI am convinced of this, for I am odd.\n\nI am distinctly original innately and in development.\n\nI have in me a quite unusual intensity of life.\n\nI can feel.\n\nI have a marvelous capacity for misery and for happiness.\n\nI am broad-minded.\n\nI am a genius.\n\nI am a philosopher of my own good peripatetic school.\n\nI care neither for right nor for wrong--my conscience is nil.\n\nMy brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility.\n\nI have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness.\n\nI know myself, oh, very well.\n\nI have attained an egotism that is rare indeed.\n\nI have gone into the deep shadows.\n\nAll this constitutes oddity. I find, therefore, that I am quite, quite odd.\n\nI have hunted for even the suggestion of a parallel among the several hundred persons that I call acquaintances. But in vain. There are people and people of varying depths and intricacies of character, but there is none to compare with me. The young ones of my own age--if I chance to give them but a glimpse of the real workings of my mind--can only stare at me in dazed stupidity, uncomprehending; and the old ones of forty and fifty--for forty and fifty are always old to nineteen--can but either stare also in stupidity, or else, their own narrowness asserting itself, smile their little devilish smile of superiority which they reserve indiscriminately for all foolish young things. The utter idiocy of forty and fifty at times!\n\nThese, to be sure, are extreme instances. There are among my young acquaintances some who do not stare in stupidity, and yes, even at forty and fifty there are some who understand some phases of my complicated character, though none to comprehend it in its entirety.\n\nBut, as I said, even the suggestion of a parallel is not to be found among them.\n\nI think at this moment, however, of two minds famous in the world of letters between which and mine there are certain fine points of similarity. These are the minds of Lord Byron and of Marie Bashkirtseff. It is the Byron of “Don Juan” in whom I find suggestions of myself. In this sublime outpouring there are few to admire the character of Don Juan, but all must admire Byron. He is truly admirable. He uncovered and exposed his soul of mingled good and bad--as the terms are--for the world to gaze upon. He knew the human race, and he knew himself.\n\nAs for that strange notable, Marie Bashkirtseff, yes, I am rather like her in many points, as I’ve been told. But in most things I go beyond her.\n\nWhere she is deep, I am deeper.\n\nWhere she is wonderful in her intensity, I am still more wonderful in my intensity.\n\nWhere she had philosophy, I am a philosopher.\n\nWhere she had astonishing vanity and conceit, I have yet more astonishing vanity and conceit.\n\nBut she, forsooth, could paint good pictures,--and I--what can I do?\n\nShe had a beautiful face, and I am a plain-featured, insignificant little animal.\n\nShe was surrounded by admiring, sympathetic friends, and I am alone--alone, though there are people and people.\n\nShe was a genius, and still more am I a genius.\n\nShe suffered with the pain of a woman, young; and I suffer with the pain of a woman, young and all alone.\n\nAnd so it is.\n\nAlong some lines I have gotten to the edge of the world. A step more and I fall off. I do not take the step. I stand on the edge, and I suffer.\n\nNothing, oh, nothing on the earth can suffer like a woman young and all alone!\n\n--Before proceeding farther with the Portraying of Mary MacLane, I will write out some of her uninteresting history.\n\nI was born in 1881 at Winnepeg, in Canada. Whether Winnepeg will yet live to be proud of this fact is a matter for some conjecture and anxiety on my part. When I was four years old I was taken with my family to a little town in western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and lonely life until I was ten. We came then to Montana.\n\nWhereat the aforesaid life was continued.\n\nMy father died when I was eight.\n\nApart from feeding and clothing me comfortably and sending me to school--which is no more than was due me--and transmitting to me the MacLane blood and character, I can not see that he ever gave me a single thought.\n\nCertainly he did not love me, for he was quite incapable of loving any one but himself. And since nothing is of any moment in this world without the love of human beings for each other, it is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether my father, Jim MacLane of selfish memory, lived or died.\n\nHe is nothing to me.\n\nThere are with me still a mother, a sister, and two brothers.\n\nThey also are nothing to me.\n\nThey do not understand me any more than if I were some strange live curiosity, as which I dare say they regard me.\n\nI am peculiarly of the MacLane blood, which is Highland Scotch. My sister and brothers inherit the traits of their mother’s family, which is of Scotch Lowland descent. This alone makes no small degree of difference. Apart from this the MacLanes--these particular MacLanes--are just a little bit different from every family in Canada, and from every other that I’ve known. It contains and has contained fanatics of many minds--religious, social, whatnot, and I am a true MacLane.\n\nThere is absolutely no sympathy between my immediate family and me. There can never be. My mother, having been with me during the whole of my nineteen years, has an utterly distorted idea of my nature and its desires, if indeed she has any idea of it.\n\nWhen I think of the exquisite love and sympathy which might be between a mother and daughter, I feel myself defrauded of a beautiful thing rightfully mine, in a world where for me such things are pitiably few.\n\nIt will always be so.\n\nMy sister and brothers are not interested in me and my analyses and philosophy, and my wants. Their own are strictly practical and material. The love and sympathy between human beings is to them, it seems, a thing only for people in books.\n\nIn short, they are Lowland Scotch, and I am a MacLane.\n\nAnd so, as I’ve said, I carried my uninteresting existence into Montana. The existence became less uninteresting, however, as my versatile mind began to develop and grow and know the glittering things that are. But I realized as the years were passing that my own life was at best a vapid, negative thing.\n\nA thousand treasures that I wanted were lacking.\n\nI graduated from the high school with these things: very good Latin; good French and Greek; indifferent geometry and other mathematics; a broad conception of history and literature; peripatetic philosophy that I acquired without any aid from the high school; genius of a kind, that has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent strong young woman’s-body; a pitiably starved soul.\n\nWith this equipment I have gone my way through the last two years. But my life, though unsatisfying and warped, is no longer insipid. It is fraught with a poignant misery--the misery of nothingness.\n\nI have no particular thing to occupy me. I write every day. Writing is a necessity--like eating. I do a little housework, and on the whole I am rather fond of it--some parts of it. I dislike dusting chairs, but I have no aversion to scrubbing floors. Indeed, I have gained much of my strength and gracefulness of body from scrubbing the kitchen floor--to say nothing of some fine points of philosophy. It brings a certain energy to one’s body and to one’s brain.\n\nBut mostly I take walks far away in the open country. Butte and its immediate vicinity present as ugly an outlook as one could wish to see. It is so ugly indeed that it is near the perfection of ugliness. And anything perfect, or nearly so, is not to be despised. I have reached some astonishing subtleties of conception as I have walked for miles over the sand and barrenness among the little hills and gulches. Their utter desolateness is an inspiration to the long, long thoughts and to the nameless wanting. Every day I walk over the sand and barrenness.\n\nAnd so, then, my daily life seems an ordinary life enough, and possibly, to an ordinary person, a comfortable life.\n\nThat’s as may be.\n\nTo me it is an empty, damned weariness.\n\nI rise in the morning; eat three meals; and walk; and work a little, read a little, write; see some uninteresting people; go to bed.\n\nNext day, I rise in the morning; eat three meals; and walk; and work a little, read a little, write; see some uninteresting people; go to bed.\n\nAgain I rise in the morning; eat three meals; and walk; and work a little, read a little, write; see some uninteresting people; go to bed.\n\nTruly an exalted, soulful life!\n\nWhat it does for me, how it affects me, I am now trying to portray."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "14 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I have in me the germs of intense life. If I could live, and if I could succeed in writing out my living, the world itself would feel the heavy intensity of it.\n\nI have the personality, the nature, of a Napoleon, albeit a feminine translation. And therefore I do not conquer; I do not even fight. I manage only to exist.\n\nPoor little Mary MacLane!--what might you not be? What wonderful things might you not do? But held down, half-buried, a seed fallen in barren ground, alone, uncomprehended, obscure--poor little Mary MacLane! Weep, world,--why don’t you?--for poor little Mary MacLane!\n\nHad I been born a man I would by now have made a deep impression of myself on the world--on some part of it. But I am a woman, and God, or the Devil, or Fate, or whosoever it was, has flayed me of the thick outer skin and thrown me out into the midst of life--has left me a lonely, damned thing filled with the red, red blood of ambition and desire, but afraid to be touched, for there is no thick skin between my sensitive flesh and the world’s fingers.\n\nBut I want to be touched.\n\nNapoleon was a man, and though sensitive his flesh was safely covered.\n\nBut I am a woman, awakening, and upon awakening and looking about me, I would fain turn and go back to sleep.\n\nThere is a pain that goes with these things when one is a woman, young, and all alone.\n\nI am filled with an ambition. I wish to give to the world a naked Portrayal of Mary MacLane: her wooden heart, her good young woman’s-body, her mind, her soul.\n\nI wish to write, write, write!\n\nI wish to acquire that beautiful, benign, gentle, satisfying thing--Fame. I want it--oh, I want it! I wish to leave all my obscurity, my misery--my weary unhappiness--behind me forever.\n\nI am deadly, deadly tired of my unhappiness.\n\nI wish this Portrayal to be published and launched into that deep salt sea--the world. There are some there surely who will understand it and me.\n\nCan I be that thing which I am--can I be possessed of a peculiar rare genius, and yet drag out my life in obscurity in this uncouth, warped, Montana town?\n\nIt must be impossible! If I thought the world contained nothing more than that for me--oh, what should I do? Would I make an end of my dreary little life now? I fear I would. I am a philosopher--and a coward. And it were infinitely better to die now in the high-beating pulses of youth than to drag on, year after year, year after year, and find oneself at last a stagnant old woman, spiritless, hopeless, with a declining body, a declining mind,--and nothing to look back upon except the visions of things that might have been--and the weariness.\n\nI see the picture. I see it plainly. Oh, kind Devil, deliver me from it!\n\nSurely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me. And always, while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there’s a treachery in it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "15 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "So then, yes. I find myself at this stage of womankind and nineteen years, a genius, a thief, a liar--a general moral vagabond, a fool more or less, and a philosopher of the peripatetic school. Also I find that even this combination can not make one happy. It serves, however, to occupy my versatile mind, to keep me wondering what it is a kind Devil has in store for me.\n\nA philosopher of my own peripatetic school--hour after hour I walk over the desolate sand and dreariness among tiny hills and gulches on the outskirts of this mining town; in the morning, in the long afternoon, in the cool of the night. And hour after hour, as I walk, through my brain some long, long pageants march: the pageant of my fancies, the pageant of my unparalleled egotism, the pageant of my unhappiness, the pageant of my minute analyzing, the pageant of my peculiar philosophy, the pageant of my dull, dull life,--and the pageant of the Possibilities.\n\nWe three go out on the sand and barrenness: my wooden heart, my good young woman’s-body, my soul. We go there and contemplate the long sandy wastes, the red, red line on the sky at the setting of the sun, the cold gloomy mountains under it, the ground without a weed, without a grass-blade even in their season--for they have years ago been killed off by the sulphur smoke from the smelters.\n\nSo this sand and barrenness forms the setting for the personality of me."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "16 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I feel about forty years old.\n\nYet I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.\n\nEvery day the atmosphere of a house becomes unbearable, so every day I go out to the sand and barrenness. It is not cold, neither is it mild. It is gloomy.\n\nI sit for two hours on the ground by the side of a pitiably small narrow stream of water. It is not even a natural stream. I dare say it comes from some mine among the hills. But it is well enough that the stream is not natural--when you consider the sand and barrenness. It is singularly appropriate.\n\nAnd I am singularly appropriate to all of them. It is good, after all, to be appropriate to something--to be in touch with something, even sand and barrenness. The sand and barrenness is old--oh, very old. You think of this when you look at it.\n\nWhat should I do if the earth were made of wood, with a paper sky!\n\nI feel about forty years old.\n\nAnd again I say I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.\n\nStill more pitiable than the sand and barrenness and the poor unnatural stream is the dry, warped cemetery where the dry, warped people of Butte bury their dead friends. It is a source of satisfaction to me to walk down to this cemetery and contemplate it, and revel in its utter pitiableness.\n\n“It is more pitiable than I and my sand and barrenness and my poor unnatural stream,” I say over and over, and take my comfort.\n\nIts condition is more forlorn than that of a woman young and alone. It is unkempt. It is choked with dust and stones. The few scattered blades of grass look rather ashamed to be seen growing there. A great many of the headstones are of wood and are in a shameful state of decay. Those that are of stone are still more shameful in their hard brightness.\n\nThe dry, warped friends of the dry, warped people of Butte are buried in this dusty, dreary, wind-havocked waste. They are left here and forgotten.\n\nThe Devil must rejoice in this graveyard.\n\nAnd I rejoice with the Devil.\n\nIt is something for me to contemplate that is more pitiable than I and my sand and barrenness and my unnatural stream.\n\nI rejoice with the Devil.\n\nThe inhabitants of this cemetery are forgotten. I have watched once the burying of a young child. Every day for a fortnight afterward I came back, and I saw the mother of the child there. She came and stood by the small new grave. After a few days more she stopped coming.\n\nI knew the woman and went to her house to see her. She was beginning to forget the child. She was beginning to take up again the thread of her life where she had let it go. The thread of her life is involved in the divorces and fights of her neighbors.\n\nOut in the warped graveyard her child is forgotten. And presently the wooden headstone will begin to decay. But the worms will not forget their part. They have eaten the small body by now, and enjoyed it. Always worms enjoy a body to eat.\n\nAnd also the Devil rejoiced.\n\nAnd I rejoiced with the Devil.\n\nThey are more pitiable, I insist, than I and my sand and barrenness--the mother whose life is involved in divorces and fights, and the worms eating at the child’s body, and the wooden headstone which will presently decay.\n\nAnd so the Devil and I rejoice.\n\nBut no matter how ferociously pitiable is the dried-up graveyard, the sand and barrenness and the sluggish little stream have their own persistent individual damnation. The world is at least so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree.\n\nI feel about forty years old.\n\nAnd I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. They do not feel any of these things at forty. At forty the fire has long since burned out. When I am forty I shall look back to myself and my feelings at nineteen--and I shall smile.\n\nOr shall I indeed smile?"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "17 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "As I have said, I want Fame. I want to write--to write such things as compel the admiring acclamations of the world at large; such things as are written but once in years, things subtly but distinctly different from the books written every day.\n\nI can do this.\n\nLet me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm. Let me but win my spurs, and then you will see me--of womankind and young--valiantly astride a charger riding down the world, with Fame following at the charger’s heels, and the multitudes agape.\n\nBut oh, more than all this I want to be happy!\n\nFame is indeed benign and gentle and satisfying. But Happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.\n\nI want Fame more than I can tell.\n\nBut more than I want Fame I want Happiness. I have never been happy in my weary young life.\n\nThink, oh, think, of being happy for a year--for a day! How brilliantly blue the sky would be; how swiftly and joyously would the green rivers run; how madly, merrily triumphant the four winds of heaven would sweep round the corners of the fair earth!\n\nWhat would I not give for one day, one hour, of that charmed thing Happiness! What would I not give up?\n\nHow we eager fools tread on each other’s heels, and tear each other’s hair, and scratch each other’s faces, in our furious gallop after Happiness! For some it is embodied in Fame, for some in Money, for some in Power, for some in Virtue--and for me in something very much like love.\n\nNone of the other fools desires Happiness as I desire it. For one single hour of Happiness I would give up at once these things: Fame, and Money, and Power, and Virtue, and Honor, and Righteousness, and Truth, and Logic, and Philosophy, and Genius. The while I would say, What a little, little price to pay for dear Happiness!\n\nI am ready and waiting to give all that I have to the Devil in exchange for Happiness. I have been tortured so long with the dull, dull misery of Nothingness--all my nineteen years. I want to be happy--oh, I want to be happy!\n\nThe Devil has not yet come. But I know that he usually comes, and I wait him eagerly.\n\nI am fortunate that I am not one of those who are burdened with an innate sense of virtue and honor which must come always before Happiness. They are but few who find their Happiness in their Virtue. The rest of them must be content to see it walk away. But with me Virtue and Honor are nothing.\n\nI long unspeakably for Happiness.\n\nAnd so I await the Devil’s coming."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "18 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "And meanwhile--as I wait--my mind occupies itself with its own good odd philosophy, so that even the Nothingness becomes almost endurable.\n\nThe Devil has given me some good things--for I find that the Devil owns and rules the earth and all that therein is. He has given me, among other things--my admirable young woman’s-body, which I enjoy thoroughly and of which I am passionately fond.\n\nA spasm of pleasure seizes me when I think in some acute moment of the buoyant health and vitality of this fine young body that is feminine in every fiber.\n\nYou may gaze at and admire the picture in the front of this book. It is the picture of a genius--a genius with a good strong young woman’s-body,--and inside the pictured body is a liver, a MacLane liver, of admirable perfectness.\n\nOther young women and older women and men of all ages have good bodies also, I doubt not--though the masculine body is merely flesh, it seems, flesh and bones and nothing else. But few recognize the value of their bodies; few have grasped the possibilities, the artistic graceful perfection, the poetry of human flesh in its health. Few have even sense enough indeed to keep their flesh in health, or to know what health is until they have ruined some vital organ, and so banished it forever.\n\nI have not ruined any of my vital organs, and I appreciate what health is. I have grasped the art, the poetry of my fine feminine body.\n\nThis at the age of nineteen is a triumph for me.\n\nSometime in the midst of the brightness of an October I have walked for miles in the still high air under the blue of the sky. The brightness of the day and the blue of the sky and the incomparable high air have entered into my veins and flowed with my red blood. They have penetrated into every remote nerve-center and into the marrow of my bones.\n\nAt such a time this young body glows with life.\n\nMy red blood flows swiftly and joyously--in the midst of the brightness of October.\n\nMy sound, sensitive liver rests gently with its thin yellow bile in sweet content.\n\nMy calm, beautiful stomach silently sings, as I walk, a song of peace.\n\nMy lungs, saturated with mountain ozone and the perfume of the pines, expand in continuous ecstasy.\n\nMy heart beats like the music of Schumann, in easy, graceful rhythm with an undertone of power.\n\nMy strong and sensitive nerves are reeking and swimming in sensuality like drunken little Bacchantes, gay and garlanded in mad revelling.\n\nThe entire wonderful, graceful mechanism of my woman’s-body has fallen at the time--like the wonderful, graceful mechanism of my woman’s-mind--under the enchanting spell of a day in October.\n\n“It is good,” I think to myself, “oh, it is good to be alive! It is wondrously good to be a woman young in the fullness of nineteen springs. It is unutterably lovely to be a healthy young animal living on this charmed earth.”\n\nAfter I have walked for several hours I reach a region where the sulphur smoke has not penetrated, and I sit on the ground with drawn-up knees and rest as the shadows lengthen. The shadows lengthen early in October.\n\nPresently I lie flat on my back and stretch my lithe slimness to its utmost like a mountain lioness taking her comfort. I am intensely thankful to the Devil for my two good legs and the full use of them under a short skirt, when, as now, they carry me out beyond the pale of civilization away from tiresome dull people. There is nothing in the world that can become so maddeningly wearisome as people, people, people!\n\nAnd so, Devil, accept, for my two good legs, my sincerest gratitude. I lie on the ground for some minutes and meditate idly. There is a worldful of easy indolent, beautiful sensuality in the figure of a young woman lying on the ground under a warm setting sun. A man may lie on the ground--but that is as far as it goes. A man would go to sleep, probably, like a dog or a pig. He would even snore, perhaps--under the setting sun. But then, a man has not a good young feminine body to feel with, to receive into itself the spirit of a warm sun at its setting, on a day in October,--and so let us forgive him for sleeping, and for snoring.\n\nWhen I rise again to a sitting posture all the brightness has focused itself to the west. It casts a yellow glamor over the earth, a glamor not of joy, nor of pleasure, nor of happiness--but of peace.\n\nThe young poplar trees smile gently in the deathly still air. The sage brush and the tall grass take on a radiant quietness. The high hills of Montana, near and distant, appear tender and benign. All is peace--peace. I think of that beautiful old song:\n\n“Sweet vale of Avoca! how calm could I rest In thy bosom of shade----.”\n\nBut I am too young yet to think of peace. It is not peace that I want. Peace is for forty and fifty. I am waiting for my Experience.\n\nI am awaiting the coming of the Devil.\n\nAnd now, just before twilight, after the sun has vanished over the edge, is the red, red line on the sky.\n\nThere will be days wild and stormy, filled with rain and wind and hail; and yet nearly always at the sun’s setting there will be calm--and the red line of sky.\n\nThere is nothing in the world quite like this red sky at sunset. It is Glory, Triumph, Love, Fame!\n\nImagine a life bereft of things, and fingers pointed at it, and eyebrows raised; tossed and bandied hither and yon; crushed, beaten, bled, rent asunder, outraged, convulsed with pain; and then, into this life while still young, the red, red line of sky!\n\nWhy did I cry out against Fate, says the line; why did I rebel against my term of anguish! I now rather rejoice at it; now in my Happiness I remember it only with deep pleasure.\n\nThink of that wonderful, admirable, matchless man of steel, Napoleon Bonaparte. He threw himself heavily on the world, and the world has never since been the same. He hated himself, and the world, and God, and Fate, and the Devil. His hatred was his term of anguish.\n\nThen the sun threw on the sky for him a red, red line--the red line of Triumph, Glory, Fame!\n\nAnd afterward there was the blackness of Night, the blackness that is not tender, not gentle.\n\nBut black as our Night may be, nothing can take from us the memory of the red, red sky. “Memory is possession,” and so the red sky we have with us always.\n\nOh, Devil, Fate, World--some one, bring me my red sky! For a little brief time, and I will be satisfied. Bring it to me intensely red, intensely full, intensely alive! Short as you will, but red, red, red!\n\nI am weary--weary, and, oh, I want my red sky! Short as it might be, its memory, its fragrance would stay with me always--always. Bring me, Devil, my red line of sky for one hour and take all, all--everything I possess. Let me keep my Happiness for one short hour, and take away all from me forever. I will be satisfied when Night has come and everything is gone.\n\nOh, I await you, Devil, in a wild frenzy of impatience!\n\nAnd as I hurry back through the cool darkness of October, I feel this frenzy in every fiber of my fervid woman’s-body."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "19 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I come from a long line of Scotch and Canadian MacLanes. There are a great many MacLanes, but there is usually only one real MacLane in each generation. There is but one who feels again the passionate spirit of the clans, those barbaric dwellers in the bleak, but well-beloved Highlands of Scotland.\n\nI am the real MacLane of my generation. The real MacLane in these later centuries is always a woman. The men of the family never amount to anything worth naming--if one accepts the acme, the zenith, of pure selfishness, with a large letter “s.” Life may be easy enough for the innumerable Canadian MacLanes who are not real. But it is certain to be more or less a Hill of Difficulty for the one who is. She finds herself somewhat alone. I have brothers and a sister and a mother in the same house with me--and I find myself somewhat alone. Between them and me there is no tenderness, no sympathy, no binding ties. Would it affect me in the least--do you suppose--if they should all die to-morrow? If I were not a real MacLane perhaps it would have been different, or perhaps I should not have missed these things.\n\nHow much, Devil, have I lost for the privilege of being a real MacLane?\n\nBut yes, I have also gained much."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "20 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I have said that I am alone.\n\nI am not quite, quite alone.\n\nI have one friend--of that Friendship that is real and is inlaid with the beautiful thing Truth. And because it has the beautiful thing Truth in it, this my one Friendship is somehow above and beyond me; there is something in it that I reach after in vain--for I have not that divinely beautiful thing Truth. Have I not said that I am a thief and a liar? But in this Friendship nevertheless there is a rare, ineffably sweet something that is mine. It is the one tender thing in this dull dreariness that wraps me round.\n\nAre there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?\n\nMy one friend is a woman some twelve or thirteen years older than I. She is as different from me as is day from night. She believes in God--that God that is shown in the Bible of the Christians. And she carries with her an atmosphere of gentleness and truth. The while I am ready and waiting to dedicate my life to the Devil in exchange for Happiness--or some lesser thing. But I love Fannie Corbin with a peculiar and vivid intensity, and with all the sincerity and passion that is in me. Often I think of her, as I walk over the sand in my Nothingness, all day long. The Friendship of her and me is a fair, dear benediction upon me, but there is something in it--deep within it--that eludes me. In moments when I realize this, when I strain and reach vainly at a thing beyond me, when indeed I see in my mind a vision of the personality of Fannie Corbin, it is then that it comes on me with force that I am not good.\n\nBut I can love her with all the ardor of a young and passionate heart.\n\nYes, I can do that.\n\nFor a year I have loved my one friend. During the eighteen years of my life before she came into it I loved no one, for there was no one.\n\nIt is an extremely hard thing to go through eighteen years with no one to love, and no one to love you--the first eighteen years.\n\nBut now I have my one friend to love and to worship.\n\nI have named my friend the “anemone lady,” a name beautifully appropriate.\n\nThe anemone lady used to teach me literature in the Butte High School. She used to read poetry in the class-room in a clear, sweet voice that made one wish one might sit there forever and listen to it.\n\nBut now I have left the high school, and the dear anemone lady has gone from Butte. Before she went she told me she would be my friend.\n\nThink of it--to live and have a friend!\n\nMy friend does not fully understand me; she thinks much too well of me. She has not a correct idea of my soul’s depths and shallows. But if she did know them she would still be my friend. She knows the heavy weight of my unrest and unhappiness. She is tenderly sympathetic. She is the one in all the world who is dear to me.\n\nOften I think, if only I could have my anemone lady and go and live with her in some little out-of-the-world place high up on the side of a mountain for the rest of my life--what more would I desire? My friendship would constitute my life. The unrest, the dreariness, the Nothingness of my existence now is so dull and gray by contrast that there would be Happiness for me in that life, Happiness softly radiant, if quiet--redolent of the fresh, thin fragrance of the dear blue anemone that grows in the winds and rains of spring.\n\nBut Miss Corbin would doubtless look somewhat askance at the idea of spending the rest of her life with me on a mountain. She is very fond of me, but her feeling for me is not like mine for her, which indeed is natural. And her life is made up mostly of sacrifices--doing for her fellow-creatures, giving of herself. She never would leave this.\n\nAnd so, then, the mountainside and the solitude and the friend with me are, like every good thing, but a vision.\n\n“Thy friend is always thy friend; not to have, nor to hold, nor to love, nor to rejoice in: but to remember.”\n\nAnd so do I remember my one friend, the anemone lady--and think often about her with passionate love."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "21 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Happiness, don’t you know, is of three kinds--and all are transitory. It never stays, but it comes and goes.\n\nThere is that happiness that comes from newly-washed feet, for instance, and a pair of clean stockings on them, particularly after one has been upon a tramp into the country. Always I have identified this kind of happiness with a Maltese cat, dipping a hungry, stealthy, sensual tongue into a bowl of fresh, thick cream.\n\nThere is that still happiness that has come to me at rare times when I have been with my one friend--and which does very well for people whose feelings are moderate. They need wish for nothing beyond it. They could not appreciate anything deeper.\n\nAnd there is that kind of happiness which is of the red sunset sky. There is something terrible in the thought of this indescribable mad Happiness. What a thing it is for a human being to be happy--with the red, red Happiness of the sunset sky!\n\nIt’s like a terrific storm in summer with rain and wind, beating quiet water into wild waves, bending great trees to the ground,--convulsing the green earth with delicious pain.\n\nIt’s like something of Schubert’s played on the violin that stirs you within to exquisite torture.\n\nIt’s like the human voice divine singing a Scotch ballad in a manner to drag your soul from your body.\n\nBut there are no words to tell it. It is something infinitely above and beyond words. It is the kind of Happiness the Devil will bring to me when he comes,--to me, to me! Oh, why does he not come now when I am in the midst of my youth! Why is he so long in coming?\n\nOften you hear a dozen stories of how the Devil was most ready and willing to take all from some one and give him his measure of Happiness. And sometimes the person was innately virtuous and so could not take the Happiness when it was offered. But Happiness is its own justification, and it should be eagerly grasped when it comes.\n\nA world filled with fools will never learn this.\n\nAnd so here I stand in the midst of Nothingness waiting and longing for the Devil, and he doesn’t come. I feel a choking, strangling, frenzied feeling of waiting--oh, why doesn’t my Happiness come! I have waited so long--so long.\n\nThere are persons who say to me that I ought not to think of the Devil, that I ought not to think of Happiness--Happiness for me would be sure to mean something wicked (as if Happiness could ever be wicked!); that I ought to think of being good. I ought to think of God. These are persons who help to fill the world with fools. At any rate their words are unable to affect me. I can not distinguish between right and wrong in this scheme of things. It is one of the lines of reasoning in which I have gotten to the edge, the end. I have gotten to the point to which all logic finally leads. I can only say, What is wrong? What is right? What is good? What is evil? The words are merely words, with word-meanings.\n\nTruth is Love, and Love is the only Truth, and Love is the one thing out of all that is real.\n\nThe Devil is really the only one to whom we may turn, and he exacts payment in full for every favor.\n\nBut surely he will come one day with Happiness for me.\n\nYet, oh, how can I wait!\n\nTo be a woman, young and all alone, is hard--hard!--is to want things, is to carry a heavy, heavy weight.\n\nOh, damn! damn! damn! Damn every living thing, the world!--the universe be damned!\n\nOh, I am weary, weary! Can’t you see that I am weary and pity me in my own damnation?"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "22 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "It is night. I might well be in my bed taking a needed rest. But first I shall write.\n\nTo-day I walked far away over the sand in the teeth of a bitter wind. The wind was determined that I should turn and come back, and equally I was determined I would go on. I went on.\n\nThere is a certain kind of wind in the autumn to walk in the midst of which causes one’s spirits to rise ecstatically. To walk in the midst of a bitter wind in January may have almost any effect.\n\nTo-day the bitter wind swept over me and around me and into the remote corners of my brain and swept away the delusions, and buffeted my philosophy with rough insolence.\n\nThe world is made up mostly of nothing. You may be convinced of this when a bitter wind has swept away your delusions.\n\nWhat is the wind?\n\nNothing.\n\nWhat is the sky?\n\nNothing.\n\nWhat do we know?\n\nNothing.\n\nWhat is fame?\n\nNothing.\n\nWhat is my heart?\n\nNothing.\n\nWhat is my soul?\n\nNothing.\n\nWhat are we?\n\nWe are nothing.\n\nWe think we progress wonderfully in the arts and sciences as one century follows another. What does it amount to? It does not teach us the all-why. It does not let us cease to wonder what it is that we are doing, where it is that we are going. It does not teach us why the green comes again to the old, old hills in the spring; why the benign balm-o’-Gilead shines wet and sweet after the rain; why the red never fails to come to the breast of the robin, the black to the crow, the gray to the little wren; why the sand and barrenness lies stretched out around us; why the clouds float high above us; why the moon stands in the sky, night after night; why the mountains and valleys live on as the years pass.\n\nThe arts and sciences go on and on--still we wonder. We have not yet ceased to weep. And we suffer still in 1902, even as they suffered in 1802, and in 802.\n\nTo-day we eat our good dinners with forks.\n\nA thousand years ago they had no forks.\n\nYet, though we have forks, we are not happy. We scream and kick and struggle and weep just as they did a thousand years ago--when they had no forks.\n\nWe are “no wiser than when Omar fell asleep.”\n\nAnd in the midst of our great wondering, we wonder why some of us are given faith to trust without question, while the rest of us are left to eat out our life’s vitals with asking.\n\nI have walked once in summer by the side of a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn. The mint and white hawthorn have with them a vivid, rare, delicious perfume. It makes you want to grovel on the ground--it makes you think you might crawl in the dust all your days, and well for you. The perfume lingers with you afterward when years have passed. You may scream and kick and struggle and weep right lustily every day of your life, but in your moments of calmness sometimes there will come back to you the fragrance of a swamp filled with mint and white hawthorn.\n\nIt is meltingly beautiful.\n\nWhat does it mean?\n\nWhat would it tell?\n\nWhy does the marsh, and the mint and white hawthorn, freeze over in the fall? And why do they come again, voluptuous, enticing, in the damp spring days--and rack the souls of wretches who look and wonder?\n\nYou are superb, Devil! You have done a magnificent piece of work. I kneel at your feet and worship you. You have wrought a perfection, a pinnacle of fine, invisible damnation.\n\nThe world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn. It is filled with things likewise damnably beautiful. There are the green, green grass-blades and the gray dawns; there are swiftly-flowing rivers and the honking of wild geese, flying low; there are human voices and human eyes; there are stories of women and men who have learned to give up and to wait; there is poetry; there is Charity; there is Truth.\n\nThe Devil has made all of these things, and also he has made human beings who can feel.\n\nWho was it that said, long ago, “Life is always a tragedy to those who feel”?\n\nIn truth, the Devil has constructed a place of infinite torture--the fair green earth, the world.\n\nBut he has made that other infinite thing--Happiness. I forgive him for making me wonder, since possibly he may bring me Happiness. I cast myself at his feet. I adore him.\n\nThe first third of our lives is spent in the expectation of Happiness. Then it comes, perhaps, and stays ten years, or a month, or three days, and the rest of our lives is spent in peace and rest--with the memory of the Happiness.\n\nHappiness--though it is infinite--is a transient emotion.\n\nIt is too brilliant, too magnificent, too overwhelming to be a lasting thing. And it is merely an emotion. But, ah--such an emotion! Through it the Devil rules his domains. What would one not do to have it!\n\nI can think of no so-called vile deed that I would scruple about if I could be happy. Everything is justified if it gives me Happiness. The Devil has done me some great favors; he has made me without a conscience, and without Virtue.\n\nFor which I thank thee, Devil.\n\nAt least I shall be able to take my Happiness when it comes--even though the piles of nice distinctions between it and me be mountains high.\n\nBut meanwhile, the world, I say, and the people are nothing, nothing, nothing. The splendid castles, the strong bridges, that we are building are of small moment. We can only go down the wide roadway wondering and weeping, and without where to lay our heads."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "23 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I have eaten my dinner.\n\nI have had, among other things, fine, rare-broiled porterhouse steak from Omaha, and some fresh, green young onions from California. And just now I am a philosopher, pure and simple--except that there’s nothing very pure about my philosophy, nor yet very simple.\n\nLet the Devil come and go; let the wild waters rush over me; let nations rise and fall; let my favorite theories form themselves in line suddenly and run into the ground; let the little earth be bandied about from one belief to another; but, I say in the midst of my young peripatetic philosophy, I need not be in complete despair--the world still contains things for me, while I have my fine rare porterhouse steak from Omaha--and my fresh green young onions from California.\n\nFame may pass over my head; money may escape me; my one friend may fail me; every hope may fold its tent and steal away; Happiness may remain a sealed book; every remnant of human ties may vanish; I may find myself an outcast; good things held out to me may suddenly be withdrawn; the stars may go out, one by one; the sun may go dark; yet still I may hold upright my head, if I have but my steak--and my onions.\n\nI may find myself crowded out from many charmed circles; I may find the ethical world too small to contain me; the social world may also exclude me; the professional world may know me not; likewise the worlds of the arts and the sciences; I may find myself superfluous in literary haunts; I may see myself going gladly back to the vile dust from whence I sprung--to live in a green forest like the melancholy Jacques; but fare they well, I will say with what cheerfulness I can summon, while I have my steak--and my onions.\n\nPossibly I may grow old and decrepit; my hair may turn gray; my bones may become rheumatic; I may grow weak in the knees; my ankle-joints which have withstood many a peripatetic journey may develop dropsical tendencies; my heart may miss a beat now and then; my lungs may begin to fight shy of wintry blasts; my eyes may fail me; my figure that is now in its slim gracefulness may swathe itself in layers of flesh, or worse, it may wither and decay and stoop at the shoulders; my red blood may flow sluggishly; but if I still have left teeth to eat with, why need I lament while I have my steak--and my onions?\n\nI am obscure; I am morbid; I am unhappy; my life is made up of Nothingness; I want everything and I have nothing; I have been made to feel the “lure of green things growing,” and I have been made to feel also that something of them is withheld from me; I have felt the deadly tiredness that is among the birthrights of a human being; but with it all the Devil has given me a philosophy of my own--the Devil has enabled me to count, if need be, the world well lost for a fine rare porterhouse steak--and some green young onions.\n\nFor which I thank thee, Devil, profoundly.\n\nWho says the Devil is not your friend? Who says the Devil does not believe in the all-merciful Law of Compensation?\n\nAnd so it is--do you see?--that all things look different after a satisfying dinner, that the color of the world changes, that life in fact resolves itself into two things: a fine rare-broiled porterhouse steak from Omaha, and some fresh green young onions from California."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "24 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I am charmingly original. I am delightfully refreshing. I am startlingly Bohemian. I am quaintly interesting--the while in my sleeve I may be smiling and smiling--and a villain. I can talk to a roomful of dull people and compel their interest, admiration, and astonishment. I do this sometimes for my own amusement. As I have said, I am a rather plain-featured, insignificant-looking genius, but I have a graceful personality. I have a pretty figure. I am well set up. And when I choose to talk in my charmingly original fashion, embellishing my conversation with many quaint lies, I have a certain very noticeable way with me, an “air.”\n\nIt is well, if one has nothing else, to acquire an air. And an air taken in conjunction with my charming originality, my delightfully refreshing candor, is something powerful and striking in its way.\n\nI do not, however, exert myself often in this way; partly because I can sometimes foresee, from the character of the assembled company, that my performance will not have the desired effect--for I am a genius, and genius at close range at times carries itself unconsciously to the point where it becomes so interesting that it is atrocious, and can not be carried farther without having somewhat mildly disastrous results; and then, again, the facial antics of some ten or a dozen persons possessed more or less of the qualities of the genus fool--even they become tiresome after a while.\n\nAlways I talk about myself on an occasion of this kind. Indeed, my conversation is on all occasions devoted directly or indirectly to myself.\n\nWhen I talk on the subject of ethics, I talk of it as it is related to Mary MacLane.\n\nWhen I give out broad-minded opinions about Ninon de l’Enclos, I demonstrate her relative position to Mary MacLane!\n\nWhen I discourse liberally on the subject of the married relation, I talk of it only as it will affect Mary MacLane.\n\nAn interesting creature, Mary MacLane.\n\nAs a matter of fact, it is so with every one, only every one is far from realizing and acknowledging it. And I have not lacked listeners, though these people do not appreciate me. They do not realize that I am a genius.\n\nI am of womankind and of nineteen years. I am able to stand off and gaze critically and dispassionately at myself and my relation to my environment, to the world, to everything the world contains. I am able to judge whether I am good and whether I am bad. I am able, indeed, to tell what I am and where I stand. I can see far, far inward. I am a genius.\n\nCharlotte Bronté did this in some degree, and she was a genius; and also Marie Bashkirtseff, and Olive Schreiner, and George Eliot. They are all geniuses.\n\nAnd so, then, I am a genius--a genius in my own right.\n\nI am fundamentally, organically egotistic. My vanity and self-conceit have attained truly remarkable development as I’ve walked and walked in the loneliness of the sand and barrenness. Not the least remarkable part of it is that I know my egotism and vanity thoroughly--thoroughly, and plume myself thereon.\n\nThese are the ear-marks of a genius--and of a fool. There is a finely-drawn line between a genius and a fool. Often this line is overstepped and your fool becomes a genius, or your genius becomes a fool.\n\nIt is but a tiny step.\n\nThere’s but a tiny step between the great and the little, the tender and the contemptuous, the sublime and the ridiculous, the aggressive and the humble, the paradise and the perdition.\n\nAnd so is it between the genius and the fool.\n\nI am a genius.\n\nI am not prepared to say how many times I may overstep the finely-drawn line, or how many times I have already overstepped it. ’Tis a matter of small moment.\n\nI have entered into certain things marvelously deep. I know things, I know that I know them, and I know that I know that I know them, which is a fine psychological point.\n\nIt is magnificent of me to have gotten so far, at the age of nineteen, with no training other than that of the sand and barrenness. Magnificent--do you hear?\n\nVery often I take this fact in my hand and squeeze it hard like an orange, to get the sweet, sweet juice from it. I squeeze a great deal of juice from it every day, and every day the juice is renewed, like the vitals of Prometheus. And so I squeeze and squeeze, and drink the juice, and try to be satisfied.\n\nYes, you may gaze long and curiously at the portrait in the front of this book. It is of one who is a genius of egotism and analysis, a genius who is awaiting the Devil’s coming,--a genius, with a wondrous liver within.\n\nI shall tell you more about this liver, I think, before I have done."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "25 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I can remember a time long, oh, very long ago. That is the time when I was a child. It is ten or a dozen years ago.\n\nOr is it a thousand years ago?\n\nIt is when you have but just parted from your friend that he seems farthest from you. When I have lived several more years the time when I was a child will not seem so far behind me.\n\nJust now it is frightfully far away. It is so far away that I can see it plainly outlined on the horizon.\n\nIt is there always for me to look at. And when I look I can feel the tears deep within me--a salt ocean of tears that roll and surge and swell bitterly in a dull, mad anguish, and never come to the surface.\n\nI do not know which is the more weirdly and damnably pathetic: I when I was a child, or I when I am grown to a woman, young and all alone. I weigh the question coldly and logically, but my logic trembles with rage and grief and unhappiness.\n\nWhen I was a child I lived in Canada and in Minnesota. I was a little wild savage. In Minnesota there were swamps where I used to wet my feet in the spring, and there were fields of tall grass where I would lie flat on my stomach in company with lizards and little garter snakes. And there were poplar leaves that turned their pale green backs upward on a hot afternoon, and soon there would be terrific thunder and lightning and rain. And there were robins that sang at dawn. These things stay with one always. And there were children with whom I used to play and fight.\n\nI was tanned and sunburned, and I had an unkempt appearance. My face was very dirty. The original pattern of my frock was invariably lost in layers and vistas of the native soil. My hair was braided or else it flew about, a tangled maze, according as I could be caught by some one and rubbed and straightened before I ran away for the day. My hands were little and strong and brown, and wrought much mischief. I came and went at my own pleasure. I ate what I pleased; I went to bed all in my own good time; I tramped wherever my stubborn little feet chose. I was impudent; I was contrary; I had an extremely bad temper; I was hard-hearted; I was full of infantile malice. Truly I was a vicious little beast.\n\nI was a little piece of untrained Nature.\n\nAnd I am unable to judge which is the more savagely forlorn: the starved-hearted child, or the woman, young and all alone.\n\nThe little wild stubborn child felt things and wanted things. She did not know that she felt things and wanted things.\n\nNow I feel and I want things and I know it with burning vividness.\n\nThe little vicious Mary MacLane suffered, but she did not know that she suffered. Yet that did not make the suffering less.\n\nAnd she reached out with a little sunburned hand to touch and take something.\n\nBut the sunburned little hand remained empty. There was nothing for it. No one had anything to put into it.\n\nThe little wild creature wanted to be loved; she wanted something to put in her hungry little heart.\n\nBut no one had anything to put into a hungry little heart.\n\nNo one said “dear.”\n\nThe little vicious child was the only MacLane, and she felt somewhat alone. But there, after all, were the lizards and the little garter snakes.\n\nThe wretched, hardened little piece of untrained Nature has grown and developed into a woman, young and alone. For the child there was a Nothingness, and for the woman there is a great Nothingness.\n\nPerhaps the Devil will bring me something in my lonely womanhood to put in my wooden heart.\n\nBut the time when I was a child will never come again. It is gone--gone. I may live through some long, long years, but nothing like it will ever come. For there is nothing like it.\n\nIt is a life by itself. It has naught to do with philosophy, or with genius, or with heights and depths, or with the red sunset sky, or with the Devil.\n\nThese come later.\n\nThe time of the child is a thing apart. It is the Planting and Seed-time. It is the Beginning of things. It decides whether there shall be brightness or bitterness in the long after-years.\n\nI have left that time far enough behind me. It will never come back. And it had a Nothingness--do you hear, a Nothingness! Oh, the pity of it! the pity of it!\n\nDo you know why it is that I look back to the horizon at the figure of an unkempt, rough child, and why I feel a surging torrent of tears and anguish and despair?\n\nI feel more than that indeed, but I have no words to tell it.\n\nI shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood.\n\nThere will always be a lacking, a wanting--some dead branches that never grew leaves.\n\nIt is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy.\n\nIt is Nothing that makes life tragedy.\n\nIt is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing.\n\nIt is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "26 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I sit at my window and look out upon the housetops and chimneys of Butte. As I look I have a weary, disgusted feeling.\n\nPeople are abominable creatures.\n\nUnder each of the roofs live a man and woman joined together by that very slender thread, the marriage ceremony--and their children, the result of the marriage ceremony.\n\nHow many of them love each other? Not two in a hundred, I warrant. The marriage ceremony is their one miserable, petty, paltry excuse for living together.\n\nThis marriage rite, it appears, is often used as a cloak to cover a world of rather shameful things.\n\nHow virtuous these people are, to be sure, under their different roof-trees. So virtuous are they indeed that they are able to draw themselves up in the pride of their own purity, when they happen upon some corner where the marriage ceremony is lacking. So virtuous are they that the men can afford to find amusement and diversion in the woes of the corner that is without the marriage rite; and the women may draw away their skirts in shocked horror and wonder that such things can be, in view of their own spotless virtue.\n\nAnd so they live on under the roofs, and they eat and work and sleep and die; and the children grow up and seek other roofs, and call upon the marriage ceremony even as their parents before them--and then they likewise eat and work and sleep and die; and so on world without end.\n\nThis also is life--the life of the good, virtuous Christians.\n\nI think, therefore, that I should prefer some life that is not virtuous.\n\nI shall never make use of the marriage ceremony. I hereby register a vow, Devil, to that effect.\n\nWhen a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make it marriage. The woman who does this need not feel the tiniest bit better than her lowest sister in the streets. Is she not indeed a step lower since she pretends to be what she is not--plays the virtuous woman? While the other unfortunate pretends nothing. She wears her name on her sleeve.\n\nIf I were obliged to be one of these I would rather be she who wears her name on her sleeve. I certainly would. The lesser of two evils, always.\n\nI can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man’s name, who bears the man’s children--who plays the virtuous woman. There are too many such in the world now.\n\nMay I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity--a virtuous woman.\n\nAnything, Devil, but that.\n\nAnd so, as I look out over the roofs and chimneys, I have a weary, disgusted feeling."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "27 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "This is not a diary. It is a Portrayal. It is my inner life shown in its nakedness. I am trying my utmost to show everything--to reveal every petty vanity and weakness, every phase of feeling, every desire. It is a remarkably hard thing to do, I find, to probe my soul to its depths, to expose its shades and half-lights.\n\nNot that I am troubled with modesty or shame. Why should one be ashamed of anything?\n\nBut there are elements in one’s mental equipment so vague, so opaque, so undefined--how is one to grasp them? I have analyzed and analyzed, and I have gotten down to some extremely fine points--yet still there are things upon my own horizon that go beyond me.\n\nThere are feelings that rise and rush over me overwhelmingly. I am helpless, crushed, and defeated, before them. It is as if they were written on the walls of my soul-chamber in an unknown language.\n\nMy soul goes blindly seeking, seeking, asking. Nothing answers. I cry out after some unknown Thing with all the strength of my being; every nerve and fiber in my young woman’s-body and my young woman’s-soul reaches and strains in anguished unrest. At times as I hurry over my sand and barrenness all my life’s manifold passions culminate in utter rage and woe. Waves of intense, hopeless longing rush over me and envelop me round and round. My heart, my soul, my mind go wandering--wandering; ploughing their way through darkness with never a ray of light; groping with helpless hands; asking, longing, wanting things: pursued by a Demon of Unrest.\n\nI shall go mad--I shall go mad, I say over and over to myself.\n\nBut no. No one goes mad. The Devil does not propose to release any one from a so beautifully-wrought, artistic damnation. He looks to it that one’s senses are kept fully intact, and he fastens to them with steel chains the Demon of Unrest.\n\nIt hurts--oh, it tortures me in the days and days! But when the Devil brings me my Happiness I will forgive him all this.\n\nWhen my Happiness is given me, the Unrest will still be with me, I doubt not, but the Happiness will change the tenor of it, will make it an instrument of joy, will clasp hands with it and mingle itself with it,--the while I, with my wooden heart, my woman’s-body, my mind, my soul, shall be in transports. I shall be filled with pleasure so deep and pain so intense that my being’s minutest nerve will reel and stagger in intoxication, will go drunk with the fullness of Life.\n\nWhen my Happiness is given me I shall live centuries in the hours. And we shall all grow old rapidly,--I and my wooden heart, and my woman’s-body, and my mind, and my soul. Sorrow may age one in some degree. But Happiness--the real Happiness--rolls countless years off from one’s finger-tips in a single moment, and each year leaves its impress.\n\nIt is true that life is a tragedy to those who feel. When my Happiness is given me life will be an ineffable, a nameless thing.\n\nIt will seethe and roar; it will plunge and whirl; it will leap and shriek in convulsion; it will guiver in delicate fantasy; it will writhe and twist; it will glitter and flash and shine; it will sing gently; it will shout in exquisite excitement; it will vibrate to the roots like a great oak in a storm; it will dance; it will glide; it will gallop; it will rush; it will swell and surge; it will fly; it will soar high--high; it will go down into depths unexplored; it will rage and rave; it will yell in utter joy; it will melt; it will blaze; it will ride triumphant; it will grovel in the dust of entire pleasure; it will sound out like a terrific blare of trumpets; it will chime faintly, faintly like the remote tinkling notes of a harp; it will sob and grieve and weep; it will revel and carouse; it will shrink; it will go in pride; it will lie prone like the dead; it will float buoyantly on air; it will moan, shiver, burst--oh, it will reek with Love and Light!\n\nThe words of the English language are futile. There are no words in it, or in any other, to express an idea of that thing which would be my life in its Happiness.\n\nThe words I have written describe it, it is true,--but confusedly and inadequately.\n\nBut words are for everyday use.\n\nWhen it comes my turn to meet face to face the unspeakable vision of the Happy Life I shall be rendered dumb.\n\nBut the rains of my feeling will come in torrents!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "28 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I am an artist of the most artistic, the highest type. I have uncovered for myself the art that lies in obscure shadows. I have discovered the art of the day of small things.\n\nAnd that surely is art with a capital “A.”\n\nI have acquired the art of Good Eating. Usually it is in the gray and elderly forties and fifties that people cultivate this art--if they ever do; it is indeed a rare art.\n\nBut I know it in all its rare exquisiteness at the young slim age of nineteen--which is one more mark of my genius, do you see?\n\nThe art of Good Eating has two essential points: one must eat only when one is hungry, and one must take small bites.\n\nThere are persons who eat for the sake of eating. They are gourmands, and partake of the natures of the pig and the buzzard. There are persons who take bites that are not small. These also are gourmands and partake of the natures of the pig and the buzzard. There are persons who can enjoy nothing in the way of eating except a luxurious, well-appointed meal. These, it is safe to say, have not acquired the art of anything.\n\nBut I--I have acquired the art of eating an olive.\n\nNow listen, and I will tell you the art of eating an olive:\n\nI take the olive in my fingers, and I contemplate its green oval richness. It makes me think at once of the land where the green citron grows--where the cypress and myrtle are emblems; of the land of the Sun where human beings are delightfully, enchantingly wicked,--where the men are eager and passionate, and the women gracefully developed in mind and in body--and their two breasts show round and full and delicately veined beneath thin drapery.\n\nThe mere sight of the olive conjures up this charming picture in my mind.\n\nI set my teeth and my tongue upon the olive, and bite it. It is bitter, salt, delicious. The saliva rushes to meet it, and my tongue is a happy tongue. As the morsel of olive rests in my mouth and is crunched and squeezed lusciously among my teeth, a quick, temporary change takes place in my character. I think of some adorable lines of the Persian poet: “Give thyself up to Joy, for thy Grief will be infinite. The stars shall again meet together at the same point in the firmament, but of thy body shall bricks be made for a palace wall.”\n\n“Oh, dear, sweet, bitter olive!” I say to myself.\n\nThe bit of olive slips down my red gullet, and so into my stomach. There it meets with a joyous welcome. Gastric juices leap out from the walls and swathe it in loving embrace. My stomach is fond of something bitter and salt. It lavishes flattery and endearment galore upon the olive. It laughs in silent delight. It feels that the day it has long waited for has come. The philosophy of my stomach is wholly epicurean. Let it receive but a tiny bit of olive and it will reck not of the morrow, nor of the past. It lives, voluptuously, in the present. It is content. It is in paradise.\n\nI bite the olive again. Again the bitter salt crisp ravishes my tongue. “If this be vanity,--vanity let it be.” The golden moments flit by and I heed them not. For am I not comfortably seated and eating an olive? Go hang yourself, you who have never been comfortably seated and eating an olive! My character evolves farther in its change. I am now bent on reckless sensuality, let happen what will. The fair earth seems to resolve itself into a thing oval and crisp and good and green and deliciously salt. I experience a feeling of fervent gladness that I am a female thing living, and that I have a tongue and some teeth, and salivary glands.\n\nAlso this bit slips down my red gullet, and again the festive Stomach lifts up a silent voice in psalms and rejoicing. It is now an absolute monarchy with the green olive at its head. The kisses of the gastric juice become hot and sensual and convulsive and ecstatic. “Avaunt, pale, shadowy ghosts of dyspepsia!” says my Stomach. “I know you not. I am of a brilliant, shining world. I dwell in Elysian fields.”\n\nOnce more I bite the olive. Once more is my tongue electrified. And the third stage in my temporary transformation takes place. I am now a gross but supremely contented sensualist. An exquisite symphony of sensualism and pleasure seems to play somewhere within me. My heart purrs. My brain folds its arms and lounges. I put my feet up on the seat of another chair. The entire world is now surely one delicious green olive. My mind is capable of conceiving but one idea--that of a green olive. Therefore the green olive is a perfect thing--absolutely a perfect thing.\n\nDisgust and disapproval are excited only by imperfections. When a thing is perfect, no matter how hard one may look at it, one can see only itself--itself, and nothing beyond.\n\nAnd so I have made my olive and my art perfect.\n\nWell, then, this third bit of olive slides down the willing gullet into my stomach. “And then my heart with pleasure fills.” The play of the gastric secretions is now marvelous. It is the meeting of the waters! It were well, ah, how well, if the hearts of the world could mingle in peace, as the gastric juices mingle at the coming of a green olive into my stomach! “Paradise! Paradise!” says my Stomach.\n\nEvery drop of blood in my passionate veins is resting. Through my stomach--my stomach, do you hear--my soul seems to feel the infinite. The minutes are flying. Shortly it will be over. But just now I am safe. I am entirely satisfied. I want nothing, nothing.\n\nMy inner quiet is infinite. I am conscious that it is but momentary, and it matters not. On the contrary, the knowledge of this fact renders the present quiet--the repose, more limitless, more intense.\n\nWhere now, Devil, is your damnation? If this be damnation, damnation let it be! If this be the human fall, then how good it is to be fallen! At this moment I would fain my fall were like yours, Lucifer, “never to hope again.”\n\nAnd so, bite by bite, the olive enters into my body and soul. Each bite brings with it a recurring wave of sensation and charm.\n\nNo. We will not dispute with the brilliant mind that declared life a tragedy to those who feel. We will let that stand. However, there are parts of the tragedy that are not tragic. There are parts that admit of a turning aside.\n\nAs the years pass, one after another, I shall continue to eat. And as I eat I shall have my quiet, my brief period of aberration.\n\nThis is the art of Eating.\n\nI have acquired it by means of self-examination, analyzing--analyzing-- analyzing. Truly my genius is analytical. And it enables me to endure--if also to feel bitterly--the heavy, heavy weight of life.\n\nWhat a worm of misery I should be were it not for these bursts of philosophy, these turnings aside!\n\nIf it please the Devil, one day I may have Happiness. That will be all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different being.\n\nBut meanwhile I shall eat.\n\nWhen the last of the olive vanishes into the stomach, when it is there reduced to animated chyme, when I play with the olive-seed in my fingers, when I lean back in my chair and straighten out my spinal column,--oh, then do you not envy me, you fine, brave world, who are not a philosopher, who have not discovered the art of the small things, who have not conscious chyme in your stomach, who have not acquired the art of Good Eating!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "29 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "As I read over now and then what I have written of my Portrayal I have alternate periods of hope and despair. At times I think I am succeeding admirably--and again, what I have written compared to what I have felt seems vapid and tame. Who has not felt the futility of words when one would express feelings?\n\nI take this hope and despair as another mark of genius. Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.\n\nI am more than fond of writing, though I have hours when I can not write any more than I could paint a picture, or play Wagner as it should be played.\n\nI think my style of writing has a wonderful intensity in it, and it is admirably suited to the creature it portrays. What sort of Portrayal of myself would I produce if I wrote with the long, elaborate periods of Henry James, or with the pleasant, ladylike phrasing of Howells? It would be rather like a little tin phonograph trolling out flowery poetry at breakneck speed, or like a deep-toned church organ pouring forth “Goo-Goo Eyes” with ponderous feeling.\n\nWhen I read a book I study it carefully to find whether the author knows things, and whether I could, with the same subject, write a better one myself.\n\nThe latter question I usually decide in the affirmative.\n\nThe highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that--to make the world see your thoughts as you see them. Eugene Field and Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens, among others, have succeeded in doing this. They impress the world with a sense of their courage and realness.\n\nThere are people who have written books which did not impress the world in this way, but which nevertheless came out of the feeling and fullness of zealous hearts. Always I think of that pathetic, artless little old-fashioned thing, “Jane Eyre,” as a picture shown to a world seeing with distorted vision. Charlotte Bronté meant one thing when she wrote the book, and the world after a time suddenly understood a quite different thing, and heaped praise and applause upon her therefor. When I read the book I was not quite able to see just what the message was that the Bronté intended to send out. But I saw that there was a message--of bravery, perhaps, or of that good which may come out of Nazareth. But the world that praised and applauded and gave her money seems totally to have missed it.\n\nIt takes centuries of tears and piety and mourning to move this world a tiny bit.\n\nBut still it will give you praise and applause and money if you will prostitute your sensibilities and emotions for the gratification of it.\n\nI have no message to hide in a book and send out. I am writing a Portrayal.\n\nBut a Portrayal is also a thing that may be misunderstood."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "30 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth. But, after all, the Devil is so clever that he could produce unexcelled workmanship with even the poorest tools.\n\nMy brain is one kind of devil’s workshop, and it is as incessantly hard-worked and always-busy a one as you could imagine.\n\nIt is a devil’s workshop, indeed, only I do the work myself. But there is a mental telegraphy between the Devil and me, which accounts for the fact that many of my ideas are so wonderfully groomed and perfumed and colored. I take no credit to myself for this, though, as I say, I do the work myself.\n\nI try always to give the Devil his due--and particularly in this Portrayal.\n\nThere are very few who give the Devil his due in this world of hypocrites.\n\nI never think of the Devil as that atrocious creature in red tights, with cloven hoofs and a tail and a two-tined fork. I think of him rather as an extremely fascinating, strong, steel-willed person in conventional clothes--a man with whom to fall completely, madly in love. I rather think, I believe, that he is incarnate at times. Why not?\n\nPeriodically I fall completely, madly in love with the Devil. He is so fascinating, so strong--so strong, exactly the sort of man whom my wooden heart awaits. I would like to throw myself at his head. I would make him a dear little wife. He would love me--he would love me. I would be in raptures. And I would love him, oh, madly, madly!\n\n“What would you have me do, little MacLane?” the Devil would say.\n\n“I would have you conquer me, crush me, know me,” I would answer.\n\n“What shall I say to you?” the Devil would ask.\n\n“Say to me, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ in your strong, steel, fascinating voice. Say it to me often, always--a million times.”\n\n“What would you have me do, little MacLane?” he would say again.\n\nI would answer: “Hurt me, burn me, consume me with hot love, shake me violently, embrace me hard, hard in your strong, steel arms, kiss me with wonderful burning kisses--press your lips to mine with passion, and your soul and mine would meet then in an anguish of joy for me!”\n\n“How shall I treat you, little MacLane?”\n\n“Treat me cruelly, brutally.”\n\n“How long shall I stay with you?”\n\n“Through the life everlasting--it will be as one day; or for one day--it will be as the life everlasting.”\n\n“And what kind of children will you bear me, little MacLane?” he would say.\n\n“I will bear wonderful, beautiful children--with great pain.”\n\n“But you hate pain,” the Devil will say, “and when you are in your pain you will hate me.”\n\n“But no,” I will answer, “pain that comes of you whom I love will be ineffable exaltation.”\n\n“And how will you treat me, little MacLane?”\n\n“I will cast myself at your feet; or I will minister to you with divine tenderness; or I will charm you with fantastic deviltry; when you weep, I will melt into tears; when you rejoice, I will go wild with delight; when you go deaf I will stop my ears; when you go blind I will put out my eyes; when you go lame I will cut off my legs. Oh, I will be divinely dear, unutterably sweet!”\n\n“Indeed you are rarely sweet,” the Devil will say. And I will be in transports.\n\nOh, Devil, Devil, Devil!\n\nOh, misery, misery of Nothingness!\n\nThe days are long--long and very weary as I await the Devil’s coming."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "31 January 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "To-day as I walked out I was impressed deeply with the wonderful beautifulness of Nature even in her barrenness. The far-distant mountains had that high, pure, transparent look, and the nearer ones were transformed completely with a wistful, beseeching attitude that reminded me of my life. It was late in the afternoon. As the sun lowered, the pure lavender of the far-away hills was tinted with faint-rose, and the gray of the nearer ones with sun-color. And the sand--my sand and barrenness--almost flushed consciously in its wide, mysterious magnitude. In the sky there was a white cloud. The sky was blue--blue almost as when I was a child. The air was very gentle. The earth seemed softened. There was an indefinite, caressing something over all that went into my soul and stirred it, and hurt it. There was that in the air which is there when something is going to happen. Only nothing ever happens. It is rare, I thought, that my sand and barrenness looks like this. I crouched on the ground, and the wondrous calm and beauty of the natural things awed and moved me with strange, still emotions.\n\nI felt, and gazed about me, and felt again. And everything was very still.\n\nPresently my eyes filled quietly with tears.\n\nI bent my head into the breast of a great gray rock. Oh, my soul, my soul, I said over and over, not with passion. It is so divine--the earth is so beautiful, so untainted--and I, what am I? It was so beautiful that now as I write, and it comes over me again, I can not restrain the tears.\n\nTears are not common.\n\nI felt my wooden heart, my soul, quivering and sobbing with their unknown wanting. This is my soul’s awakening. Ah, the pain of my soul’s awakening! Is there nothing, nothing to help this pain? I am so lonely, so lonely--Fannie Corbin, my one friend, my dearly-loved anemone lady, I want you so much--why aren’t you here! I want to feel your hand with mine as I felt it sometimes before you went away. You are the only one among a worldful of people to care a little--and I love you with all the strength and worship I can give to the things that are beautiful and true. You are the only one, the only one--and my soul is full of pain, and I am sitting alone on the ground, and my head lies on a rock’s breast.--\n\nStrange, sweet passions stirred and waked somewhere deep within me as I sat shivering on the ground. And I felt them singing far away, as if their faint voices came out of that limitless deep, deep blue above me; and it was like a choir of spirit-voices, and they sang of love and of light and of dear tender dreams, and of my soul’s awakening. Why is this--and what is it that is hurting so? Is it because I am young, or is it because I am alone, or because I am a woman?\n\nOh, it is a hard and bitter thing to be a woman! And why--why? Is woman so foul a creature that she must needs be purged by this infinite pain?\n\nThe choir of faint, sweet voices comes to me incessantly out of the blue. My wooden heart and my soul are listening to them intently. The voices are trying hard to tell me, to help me, but I can not understand. I know only that it is about pure, exalted things, and about the all-abiding love that is somewhere; and it is about the earth-love, and about Truth,--but I can not understand. And the voices sing of me the child--a song of the unloved, starved little being; and a song of the unloved, half-grown creature; and a song of me, a woman and all alone--awaiting the Devil’s coming.\n\nOh, my soul--my soul!\n\nA female snake is born out of its mother’s white egg, and lives awhile in content among weeds and grass, and dies.\n\nA female dog lives some years, and has bones thrown at her, and sometimes she receives a kick or a blow, and a dog-house to sleep in, and dies.\n\nA female bird has a nest, and worms to eat, and goes south in the winter, and presently she dies.\n\nA female toad has a swamp or a garden, some bugs and flies, contentment--and then she dies.\n\nAnd each of these has a male thing with her for a time, and soon there are little snakes or little dogs for her to love as much as it is given her to love--she can do no more.\n\nAnd they are fortunate with their little snakes and little dogs.\n\nA female human being is born out of her mother’s fair body, branded with a strange, plague-tainted name, and let go; and lives awhile, and dies. But before she dies she awakes. There is a pain that goes with it.\n\nAnd the male thing that is with her for a time is unlike a snake or a dog. It is more like a man, and there is another pain for this.\n\nAnd when a little human being comes with a soul of its own there must be another awakening, for she has then reached the best and highest state that any human being can reach, though she is a female human being, and plague-tainted. And here also there is heavy soul-pain.\n\nThe name--the plague-tainted name branded upon her--means woman.\n\nI lifted my head from the breast of the gray rock. The tears had been falling, falling. Tears are so strange! Tears from the dried-up fountain of nineteen years are like drops of water wrung out of stone. Suddenly I got up from the ground and ran quickly over the sand for several minutes. I did not dare look again at the hilltops and the deep blue, nor listen again to the voices.\n\nOh, with it all, I am a coward! I shrink and cringe before the pain of the dazzling lights. Yet I am waiting--longing for the most dazzling light of all: the coming of the Devil."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "1 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Oh, the wretched bitter loneliness of me!\n\nIn all the deep darkness, and the silence, there is never a faint human light, never a voice!\n\nHow can I bear it--how can I bear it!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "2 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I have been looking over the confessions of the Bashkirtseff. They are indeed rather like my Portrayal, but they are not so interesting, nor so intense. I have a stronger individuality than Marie Bashkirtseff, though her mind was probably in a higher state of development than mine, even when she was younger than I.\n\nMost of her emotions are vacillating and inconsistent. She worships a God one day and blasphemes him the next. She never loves her God. And why, then, does she have a God? Why does she not abandon him altogether? He seems to be of no use to her--except as a convenient thing on which to fasten the blame for her misfortunes.--And, after all, that is something very useful indeed.--And she loves the people about her one day, and the next day she hates them.\n\nBut in her great passion--her ambition, Marie Bashkirtseff was beautifully consistent. And what terrific storms of woe and despair must have enveloped her when she knew that within a certain period she would be dead--removed from the world, and her work left undone! The time kept creeping nearer--she must have tasted the bitterness of death indeed. She was sure of success, sure that her high-strained ambition would be gratified to its last vestige--and then, to die! It was certainly hard lines for the little Bashkirtseff.\n\nMy own despair is of an opposite nature.\n\nThere is one thing in the world that is more bitter than death--and that is life.\n\nSuppose that I learned I was to die on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903, for instance. It would give me a soft warm wave of pleasure, I think. I might be in the depths of woe at the time; my despair might be the despair of despair; my misery utterly unceasing,--and I could say, Never mind, on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903, all will be over--dull misery, rage, Nothingness, obscurity, the unknown longing, every desire of my soul, all the pain--ended inevitably, completely on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903. I might come upon a new pain, but this, my long old torture, would cease.\n\nYou may say that I might end my life on that day, that I might do so now. I certainly shall if the pain becomes greater than I can bear--for what else is there to do? But I shall be far from satisfied in doing so. What if I were to end everything now--when perhaps the Devil may be coming to me in two years’ time with Happiness?\n\nUpon dying it might be that I should go to some wondrous fair country where there would be trees and running water, and a resting-place. Well--oh, well! But I want the earthly Happiness. I am not high-minded and spiritual. I am earthly, human--sensitive, sensuous, sensual, and, ah, dear, my soul wants its earthly Happiness!\n\nI can not bring myself to the point of suicide while there is a possibility of Happiness remaining. But if I knew that irrevocable, inevitable death awaited me on June twenty-seventh, 1903, I should be satisfied. My Happiness might come before that time, or it might not. I should be satisfied. I should know that my life was out of my hands. I should know, above all, that my long, long, old, old pain of loneliness would stop, June twenty-seventh, 1903.\n\nI shall die naturally some day--probably after I have grown old and sour. If I have had my Happiness for a year or a day, well and good. I shall be content to grow as old and as sour as the Devil wills. But having had no Happiness--if I find myself growing old and still no Happiness--oh, then I vow I will not live another hour, even if dying were rushing headlong to damnation!\n\nI am, do you see, a philosopher and a coward--with the philosophy of cowardice. I squeeze juice also from this fact sometimes--but the juice is not sweet juice.\n\nThe Devil--the fascinating man-devil--it may be, is coming, coming, coming.\n\nAnd meanwhile I go on and on, in the midst of sand and barrenness."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "3 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "The town of Butte presents a wonderful field to a student of humanity and human nature. There are not a great many people--seventy thousand perhaps--but those seventy thousand are in their way unparalleled. For mixture, for miscellany--variedness, Bohemianism--where is Butte’s rival?\n\nThe population is not only of all nationalities and stations, but the nationalities and stations mix and mingle promiscuously with each other, and are partly concealed and partly revealed in the mazes of a veneer that belongs neither to nation nor to station, but to Butte.\n\nThe nationalities are many, it is true, but Irish and Cornish predominate. My acquaintance extends widely among the inhabitants of Butte. Sometimes when I feel in the mood for it I spend an afternoon in visiting about among divers curious people.\n\nAt some Fourth of July demonstration, or on a Miners’ Union day, the heterogeneous herd turns out--and I turn out, with the herd and of it, and meditate and look on. There are Irishmen--Kelleys, Caseys, Calahans, staggering under the weight of much whiskey, shouting out their green-isle maxims; there is the festive Cornishman, ogling and leering, greeting his fellow-countrymen with alcoholic heartiness, and gazing after every feminine creature with lustful eyes; there are Irish women swearing genially at each other in shrill pleasantry, and five or six loudly-vociferous children for each; there are round-faced Cornish women likewise, each with her train of children; there are suave, sleek sporting men just out of the bath-tub; insignificant lawyers, dentists, messengerboys; “plungers” without number; greasy Italians from Meaderville; greasier French people from the Boulevarde Addition; ancient miners--each of whom was the first to stake a claim in Butte; starved-looking Chinamen here and there; a contingent of Finns and Swedes and Germans; musty, stuffy old Jew pawn-brokers who have crawled out of their holes for a brief recreation; dirt-encrusted Indians and squaws in dirty, gay blankets, from their flea-haunted camp below the town; “box-rustlers”--who are as common in Butte as bar-maids in Ireland; swell, flashy-looking Africans; respectable women with white aprons tied around their waists and sailor-hats on their heads, who have left the children at home and stepped out to see what was going on; innumerable stray youngsters from the dark haunts of Dublin Gulch; heavy restaurant-keepers with toothpicks in their mouths; a vast army of dry-goods clerks--the “paper-collared” gentry; miners of every description; representatives from Dog Town, Chicken Flats, Busterville, Butchertown, and Seldom Seen--suburbs of Butte; pale, thin individuals who sing and dance in beer-halls; smart society people in high traps and tally-hos; impossible women--so-called (though in Butte no one is more possible), in vast hats and extremely plaid stockings; persons who take things seriously and play the races for a living; “beer-jerkers”; “biscuit-shooters”; soft-voiced Mexicans and Arabians;--the dregs, the élite, the humbly respectable, the off-scouring--all thrown together, and shaken up, and mixed well.\n\nOne may notice many odd bits of irony as one walks among these. One may notice that the Irishmen are singularly carefree and strong and comfortable--and so jolly! while the Irish women are frumpish and careworn and borne earthward with children. The Cornishman who has consumed the greatest amount of whiskey is the most agreeable, and less and less inclined to leer and ogle. The Cornish woman whose profanity is the shrillest and most genial and voluble, is she whose life seems the most weighted and downtrodden. The young women whose bodies are encased in the tightest and stiffest corsets are in the most wildly hilarious spirits of all. The filthy little Irish youngsters from Dublin Gulch are much brighter and more clever in every way than the ordinary American children who are less filthy. A delicate aroma of cocktails and whiskey-and-soda hangs over even the four-in-hands and automobiles of the upper crust. Gamblers, newsboys, and Chinamen are the most chivalrously courteous among them. And the modest-looking “plunger” who has drunk the greatest number of high-balls is the most gravely, quietly polite of all. The rolling, rollicking, musical profanity of the “ould sod”--Bantry Bay, Donegal, Tyrone, Tipperary--falls much less limpidly from the cigaretted lips of the ten-year-old lad than from those of his mother, who taught it to him. One may notice that the husband and wife who smile the sweetest at each other in the sight of the multitudes are they whose countenances bear various scars and scratches commemorating late evening orgies at home; that the peculiar solid, block-shaped appearance of some of the miners’ wives is due quite as much to the quantity of beer they drink as to their annual maternity; that the one grand ruling passion of some men’s lives is curiosity;--that the entire herd is warped, distorted, barren, having lived its life in smoke-cured Butte.\n\nA single street in Butte contains people in nearly every walk of life--living side by side resignedly, if not in peace.\n\nIn a row of five or six houses there will be living miners and their families, the children of which prevent life from stagnating in the street while their mothers talk to each other--with the inevitable profanity--over the back-fences. On the corner above there will be a mysterious widow with one child, who has suddenly alighted upon the neighborhood, stealthily in the night, and is to be seen at rare intervals emerging from her door--the target for dozens of pairs of eager eyes and half as many eager tongues. And when the mysterious widow, with her one child, disappears some night as suddenly and as stealthily as she appeared, an outburst of highly-colored rumors is tossed with astonishing glibness over the various back-fences--all relating to the mysterious widow’s shady antecedents and past history, to those of her child, and to the cause of her sudden departure,--no two of which rumors agree in any particular. Across on the opposite corner there will be a company of strange people who also descended suddenly, and upon whom the eyes of the entire block are turned with absorbing interest. They consist of half-a-dozen men and women seemingly bound together only by ties of conviviality. The house is kept closely-blinded and quiet all day, only to burst forth in a blaze of revel in the evening, which revel lasts all night. This goes on until some momentous night, at the request of certain proper ones, a police officer glides quietly into the midst of a scene of unusual gaiety--and the festive company melts into oblivion, never to return. They also are then discussed with rapturous relish and in tones properly lowered, over the back-fences. Farther down the street there will live an interesting being of feminine persuasion who has had five divorces and is in course of obtaining another. These divorces, the causes therefor, the justice thereof, and the future prospects of the multi-grass widow, are gone over, in all their bearings, by the indefatigable tongues. Every incident in the history of the street is put through a course of sprouts by these same tireless members. The Jewish family that lives in the poorest house in the neighborhood, and that is said to count its money by the hundred thousands; the aristocratic family with the Irish-point curtains in the windows--that lives on the county; the family whose husband and father gains for it a comfortable livelihood--forging checks; the miner’s family whose wife and mother wastes its substance in diamonds and sealskin coats and other riotous living; the family in extremely straitened circumstances into which new babies arrive in great and distressing numbers; the strange lady with an apoplectic complexion and a wonderfully foul and violent flow of invective--all are discussed over and over and over again. No one is omitted.\n\nAnd so this is Butte, the promiscuous--the Bohemian. And all these are the Devil’s playthings. They amuse him, doubtless.\n\nButte is a place of sand and barrenness.\n\nThe souls of these people are dumb."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "4 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Always I wonder, when I die will there be any one to remember me with love?\n\nI know I am not lovable.\n\nThat I want it so much only makes me less lovable, it seems. But--who knows?--it may be there will be some one.\n\nMy anemone lady does not love me. How can she--since she does not understand me? But she allows me to love her--and that carries me a long way. There are many--oh, a great many--who will not allow you to love them if you would.\n\nThere is no one to love me now.\n\nAlways I wonder how it will be after some long years when I find myself about to die."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "7 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "In this house where I drag out my accursed, devilish, weary existence, upstairs in the bathroom, on the little ledge at the top of the wainscoting, there are six tooth-brushes: an ordinary white bone-handled one that is my younger brother’s; a white twisted-handled one that is my sister’s; a flat-handled one that is my older brother’s; a celluloid-handled one that is my stepfather’s; a silver-handled one that is mine; and another ordinary one that is my mother’s. The sight of these tooth-brushes day after day, week after week, and always, is one of the most crushingly maddening circumstances in my fool’s life.\n\nEvery Friday I wash up the bathroom. Usually I like to do this. I like the feeling of the water squeezing through my fingers, and always it leaves my nails beautifully neat. But the obviousness of those six tooth-brushes signifying me and the five other members of this family and the aimless emptiness of my existence here--Friday after Friday--makes my soul weary and my heart sick.\n\nNever does the pitiable, barren, contemptible, damnable, narrow Nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with so intense a force as when my eyes happen upon those six tooth-brushes.\n\nAmong the horrors of the Inquisition, a minute refinement of cruelty was reached when the victim’s head was placed beneath a never-ceasing falling of water, drop by drop.\n\nA convict sentenced to solitary confinement, spending his endless days staring at four blank walls, feels that had he committed every known crime he could not possibly deserve his punishment.\n\nI am not undergoing an Inquisition, nor am I a convict in solitary confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly through their tooth-brushes--and those I should like, above all things, to gather up and pitch out of the bathroom window--and oh, damn them, damn them!\n\nYou who read this, can you understand the depth of bitterness and hatred that is contained in this for me? Perhaps you can a little if you are a woman and have felt yourself alone.\n\nWhen I look at the six tooth-brushes a fierce, lurid storm of rage and passion comes over me. Two heavy leaden hands lay hold of my life and press, press, press. They strike the sick, sick weariness to my inmost soul.\n\nOh, to leave this house and these people, and this intense Nothingness--oh, to pass out from them, forever! But where can I go, what can I do? I feel with mad fury that I am helpless. The grasp of the stepfather and the mother is contemptible and absurd--but with the persistence and tenacity of narrow minds. It is like the two heavy leaden hands. It is not seen--it is not tangible. It is felt.\n\nOnce I took away my own silver-handled tooth-brush from the bathroom ledge, and kept it in my bedroom for a day or two. I thought to lessen the effect of the six.\n\nI put it back in the bathroom.\n\nThe absence of one accentuated the significant damnation of the others. There was something more forcibly maddening in the five than in the six tooth-brushes. The damnation was not worse, but it developed my feeling about them more vividly.\n\nAnd so I put my tooth-brush back in the bathroom.\n\nThis house is comfortably furnished. My mother spends her life in the adornment of it. The small square rooms are distinctly pretty.\n\nBut when I look at them seeingly I think of the proverb about the dinner of stalled ox.\n\nYet there is no hatred here, except mine and my bitterness. I am the only one of them whose bitter spirit cries out against things.\n\nBut there is that which is subtler and strikes deeper. There is the lack of sympathy--the lack of everything that counts: there is the great, deep Nothing.\n\nHow much better were there hatred here than Nothing!\n\nI long hopelessly for will-power, resolution to take my life into my own hands, to walk away from this house some day and never return. I have nowhere to go--no money, and I know the world quite too well to put the slightest faith in its voluntary kindness of heart. But how much better and wider, less damned, less maddening, to go out into it and be beaten and cheated and fooled with, than this!--this thing that gathers itself easily into a circle made of six tooth-brushes with a sufficiency of surplus damnation.\n\nI have read about a woman who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. Perhaps she had a house at Jerusalem with six tooth-brushes and Nothingness. In that case she might have rushed gladly into the arms of thieves.\n\nI think of crimes that strike horror and revulsion to my maid-senses. And I think of my Nothingness, and I ask myself were it not better to walk the earth an outcast, a solitary woman, and meet and face even these, than that each and every one of my woman-senses should wear slowly, painfully to shreds, and strain and break--in this unnameable Nothing?\n\nOh, the dreariness--the hopelessness of Nothing!\n\nThere are no words to tell it. And things are always hardest to bear when there are no words for them.\n\nHowever great one’s gift of language may be, there is always something that one can not tell.\n\nI am weary of self--always self. But it must be so.\n\nMy life is filled with self.\n\nIf my soul could awaken fully perhaps I might be lifted out of myself--surely I should be. But my soul is not awake. It is awakening, trying to open its eyes; and it is crying out blindly after something, but it can not know. I have a dreadful feeling that it will stay always like this.\n\nOh, I feel everything--everything! I feel what might be. And there is Nothing. There are six tooth-brushes.\n\nWould I stop for a few fine distinctions, a theory, a natural law even, to escape from this into Happiness--or into something greatly less?\n\nMisery--misery! If only I could feel it less!\n\nOh, the weariness, the weariness--as I await the Devil’s coming."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "8 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Often I walk out to a place on the flat valley below the town, to flirt with Death. There is within me a latent spirit of coquetry, it appears.\n\nDown on the flat there is a certain deep, dark hole with several feet of water at the bottom.\n\nThis hole completely fascinates me. Sometimes when I start out to walk in a quite different direction, I feel impelled almost irresistibly to turn and go down on the flat in the direction of the fascinating, deep black hole.\n\nAnd here I flirt with Death. The hole is so narrow--only about four feet across--and so dark, and so deep! I don’t know whether it was intended to be a well, or whether it is an abandoned shaft of some miner. At any rate it is isolated and deserted, and it has a rare loving charm for me.\n\nI go there sometimes in the early evening, and kneel on the edge of it and lean over the dark pit, with my hand grasping a wooden stake that is driven into the ground near by. And I drop little stones down and hear them splash hollowly, and it sounds a long way off.\n\nThere is something wonderfully soothing, wonderfully comforting to my unrestful, aching wooden heart in the dark mystery of this fascinating hole. Here is the End for me, if I want it--here is the Ceasing, when I want it. And I lean over and smile quietly.\n\n“No flowers,” I say softly to myself, “no weeping idiots, no senseless funeral, no oily undertaker fussing over my woman’s-body, no useless Christian prayers. Nothing but this deep dark restful grave.”\n\nNo one would ever find it. It is a mile and a half from any house.\n\nThe water--the dark still water at the bottom--would gurgle over me and make an end quickly. Or if I feared there was not enough water, I would bring with me a syringe and some morphine and inject an immense quantity into one white arm, and kneel over the tender darkness until my youth-weary, waiting-worn senses should be overcome, and my slim, light body should fall. It would splash into the water at the bottom--it would follow the little stones at last. And the black, muddy water would soak in and begin the destroying of my body, and murky bubbles would rise so long as my lungs continued to breathe. Or perhaps my body would fall against the side of the hole, and the head would lie against it out of the water. Or perhaps only the face would be out of the water, turned upward to the light above--or turned half-down, and the hair would be darkly wet and heavy, and the face would be blue-white below it, and the eyes would sink inward.\n\n“The End, the End!” I say softly and ecstatically. Yet I do not lean farther out. My hand does not loosen its tight grasp on the wooden stake. I am only flirting with Death now.\n\nDeath is fascinating--almost like the Devil. Death makes use of all his arts and wiles, powerful and alluring, and flirts with deadly temptation for me. And I make use of my arts and wiles--and tempt him.\n\nDeath would like dearly to have me, and I would like dearly to have him. It is a flirtation that has its source in mutual desire. We do not love each other, Death and I,--we are not friends. But we desire each other sensually, lustfully.\n\nSometime I suppose I shall yield to the desire. I merely play at it now--but in an unmistakable manner. Death knows it is only a question of time.\n\nBut first the Devil must come. First the Devil, then Death: a deep dark soothing grave--and the early evening, “and a little folding of the hands to sleep.”"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "12 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I am in no small degree, I find, a sham--a player to the gallery. Possibly this may be felt as you read these analyses.\n\nWhile all of these emotions are written in the utmost seriousness and sincerity, and are exactly as I feel them, day after day--so far as I have the power to express what I feel--still I aim to convey through them all the idea that I am lacking in the grand element of Truth--that there is in the warp and woof of my life a thread that is false--false.\n\nI don’t know how to say this without the fear of being misunderstood. When I say I am in a way a sham, I have no reference to the truths as I have given them in this Portrayal, but to a very light and subtle thing that runs through them.\n\nOh, do not think for an instant that this analysis of my emotions is not perfectly sincere and real, and that I have not felt all of them more than I can put into words. They are my tears--my life-blood!\n\nBut in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.\n\nI have not succeeded thoroughly in analyzing this--it is so thin, so elusive, so faint--and yet not little. It is a natural thing enough viewed in the light of my other traits.\n\nI have lived my nineteen years buried in an environment at utter variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never touched, and my sympathies very rarely, if ever, appealed to. I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. Never, that is to say, to any one except my one friend, the anemone lady.--And so every day of my life I am playing a part; I am keeping an immense bundle of things hidden under my cloak. When one has played a part--a false part--all one’s life, for I was a sly, artful little liar even in the days of five and six; then one is marked. One may never rid oneself of the mantle of falseness, charlatanry--particularly if one is innately a liar.\n\nA year ago when the friendship of my anemone lady was given me, and she would sometimes hear sympathetically some long-silent bit of pain, I felt a snapping of tense-drawn cords, a breaking away of flood-gates--and a strange, new pain. I felt as if I must clasp her gentle hand tightly and give way to the pent-up, surging tears of eighteen years. I had wanted this tender thing more than anything else all my life, and it was given me suddenly.\n\nI felt a convulsion and a melting, within.\n\nBut I could not tell my one friend exactly what I felt. There was no doubt in my own mind as to my own perfect sincerity of feeling, but there was with it and around it this vapor of fraud, a spirit of falseness that rose and confronted me and said, “hypocrite,” “fool.”\n\nIt may be that the spirit of falseness is itself a false thing--yet true or false, it is with me always. I have tried, in writing out my emotions, to convey an idea of this sham element while still telling everything faithfully true. Sometimes I think I have succeeded, and at other times I seem to have signally failed. This element of falseness is absolutely the very thinnest, the very finest, the rarest of all the things in my many-sided character.\n\nIt is not the most unimportant.\n\nI have seen visions of myself walking in various pathways. I have seen myself trying one pathway and another. And always it is the same: I see before me in the path, darkening the way and filling me with dread and discouragement, a great black shadow--the shadow of my own element of falseness.\n\nI can not rid myself of it.\n\nI am an innate liar.\n\nThis is a hard thing to write about. Of all things it is the most liable to be misunderstood. You will probably misunderstand it, for I have not succeeded in giving the right idea of it. I aimed at it and missed it. It eluded me completely.\n\nYou must take the idea as I have just now presented it for what it may be worth. This is as near as I can come to it. But it is something infinitely finer and rarer.\n\nIt is a difficult task to show to others a thing which, though I feel and recognize it thoroughly, I have not yet analyzed for myself.\n\nBut this is a complete Portrayal of me--as I await the Devil’s coming--and I must tell everything--everything."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "13 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "So then, yes. As I have said, I find that I am quite, quite odd. My various acquaintances say that I am funny. They say, “Oh, it’s that May MacLane, Dolly’s younger sister. She’s funny.” But I call it oddity. I bear the hall-mark of oddity.\n\nThere was a time, a year or two since, when I was an exceedingly sensitive little fool--sensitive in that it used to strike very deep when my young acquaintances would call me funny and find in me a vent for their distinctly unfriendly ridicule. My years in the high school were not years of joy. Two years ago I had not yet risen above these things. I was a sensitive little fool.\n\nBut that sensitiveness, I rejoice to say, has gone from me. The opinion of these young people, or of these old people, is now a thing that is quite unable to affect me.\n\nThe more I see of conventionality, it seems, the more I am odd.\n\nThough I am young and feminine--very feminine--yet I am not that quaint conceit, a girl: the sort of person that Laura E. Richards writes about, and Nora Perry, and Louisa M. Alcott,--girls with bright eyes, and with charming faces (they always have charming faces), standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet,--and all that sort of thing.\n\nI missed all that.\n\nI have read some girl-books, a few years ago--“Hildegarde Grahame,” and “What Katy Did,” and all,--but I read them from afar. I looked at those creatures from behind a high board fence. I felt as if I had more tastes in common with the Jews wandering through the wilderness, or with a band of fighting Amazons. I am not a girl. I am a woman, of a kind. I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.\n\nAnd then, usually, if one is not a girl one is a heroine--of the kind you read about. But I am not a heroine, either. A heroine is beautiful--eyes like the sea shoot opaque glances from under drooping lids--walks with undulating movements, her bright smile haunts one still, falls methodically in love with a man--always with a man, eats things (they are always called “viands”) with a delicate appetite, and on special occasions her voice is full of tears. I do none of these things. I am not beautiful. I do not walk with undulating movements--indeed, I have never seen any one walk so, except, perhaps, a cow that has been overfed. My bright smile haunts no one. I shoot no opaque glances from my eyes, which are not like the sea by any means. I have never eaten any viands, and my appetite for what I do eat is most excellent. And my voice has never yet, to my knowledge, been full of tears.\n\nNo, I am not a heroine.\n\nThere never seem to be any plain heroines, except Jane Eyre, and she was very unsatisfactory. She should have entered into marriage with her beloved Rochester in the first place. I should have, let there be a dozen mad wives upstairs. But I suppose the author thought she must give her heroine some desirable thing--high moral principles, since she was not beautiful. Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I’m sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little. And I know several persons who might well say the same. But, anyway, I wish some one would write a book about a plain, bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her.\n\nSo far from being a girl or a heroine, I am a thief--as I have before suggested.\n\nI mind me of how, not long since, I stole three dollars. A woman whom I know rather well, and lives near, called me into her house as I was passing and asked me to do an errand for her. She was having an ornate gown made, and she needed some more appliqué with which to festoon it. The appliqué cost nine dollars a yard. My trusting neighbor gave me a bit of the braid for a sample and two twenty-dollar bills. I was to get four yards. I did so, and came back and gave her the braid and a single dollar. The other three dollars I kept myself. I wanted three dollars very much, to put with a few that I already had in my purse. My trusting neighbor is of the kind that throws money about carelessly. I knew she would not pay any attention to a little detail like that,--she was deeply interested in her new frock; or perhaps she would think I had got thirty-nine dollars’ worth of appliqué. At any rate, she did not need the money, and I wanted three dollars, and so I stole it.\n\nI am a thief.\n\nIt has been suggested to me that I am a kleptomaniac. But I am sure my mind is perfectly sane. I have no such excuse. I am a plain, downright thief.\n\nThis is only one of my many peculations. I steal money, or anything that I want, whenever I can, nearly always. It amuses me--and one must be amused.\n\nI have only two stipulations: that the person to whom it belongs does not need it pressingly, and that there is not the smallest chance of being found out. (And of course I could not think of stealing from my one friend.)\n\nIt would be extremely inconvenient to be known as a thief, merely.\n\nWhen the world knows you are a thief it blinds itself completely to your other attributes. It calls you a thief, and there’s an end. I am a genius as well as a thief--but the world would quite overlook that fact. “A thief’s a thief,” says the world. That is very true. But the mere fact of being a thief should not exclude the consideration of one’s other traits. When the world knows you are a Methodist minister, for instance, it will admit that you may also be a violinist, or a chemist, or a poet, and will credit you therefor. And so if it condemns you for being a thief, it should at the same time admire you for being a genius. If it does not admire you for being a genius, then it has no right to condemn you for being a thief.\n\n--And why the world should condemn any one for being a thief--when there is not within its confines any one who is not a thief in some way--is a bit of irony upon which I have wasted much futile logic.--\n\nI am not trying to justify myself for stealing. I do not consider it a thing that needs to be justified, any more than walking or eating or going to bed. But, as I say, if the world knew that I am a thief without being first made aware with emphasis that I am some other things also, then the world would be a shade cooler for me than it already is--which would be very cool indeed.\n\nAnd so in writing my Portrayal I have dwelt upon other things at some length before touching on my thieving propensities.\n\nNone of my acquaintances would suspect that I am a thief. I look so respectable, so refined, so “nice,” so inoffensive, so sweet, even!\n\nBut, for that matter, I am a great many things that I do not appear to be.\n\nThe woman from whom I stole the three dollars, if she reads this, will recognize it. This will be inconvenient. I fervently hope she may not read it. It is true she is not of the kind that reads.\n\nBut, after all, it’s of no consequence. This Portrayal is Mary MacLane: her wooden heart, her young woman’s-body, her mind, her soul.\n\nThe world may run and read.\n\nI will tell you what I did with the three dollars. In Dublin Gulch, which is a rough quarter of Butte inhabited by poor Irish people, there lives an old world-soured, wrinkled-faced woman. She lives alone in a small, untidy house. She swears frightfully like a parrot, and her reputation is bad--so bad, indeed, that even the old woman’s compatriots in Dublin Gulch do not visit her lest they damage their own. It is true that the profane old woman’s morals are not good--have never been good--judged by the world’s standards. She bears various marks of cold, rough handling on her mind and body. Her life has all but run its course. She is worn out.\n\nOnce in a while I go to visit this old woman--my reputation must be sadly damaged by now.\n\nI sit with her for an hour or two and listen to her. She is extremely glad to have me there. Except me she has no one to talk to but the milkman, the groceryman, and the butcher. So always she is glad to see me. There is a certain bond of sympathy between her and me. We are fond of each other. When she sees me picking my way towards her house, her hard, sour face softens wonderfully and a light of distinct friendliness comes into her green eyes.\n\nDon’t you know, there are few people enough in the world whose hard, sour faces will soften at sight of you and a distinctly friendly light come into their green eyes. For myself, I find such people few indeed.\n\nSo the profane old woman and I are fond of each other. No question of morals, or of immorals, comes between us. We are equals.\n\nI talk to her a little--but mostly she talks. She tells me of the time when she lived in County Galway, when she was young--and of her several husbands, and of some who were not husbands, and of her children scattered over the earth. And she shows me old tin-types of these people. She has told me the varied tale of her life a great many times. I like to hear her tell it. It is like nothing else I have heard. The story in its unblushing simplicity, the sour-faced old woman sitting telling it, and the tin-types,--contain a thing that is absurdly, grotesquely, tearlessly sad.\n\nOnce when I went to her house I brought with me six immense, heavy, fragrant chrysanthemums.\n\nThey had been bought with the three dollars I had stolen.\n\nIt pleased me to buy them for the profane old woman. They pleased her also--not because she cares much for flowers, but because I brought them to her. I knew they would please her, but that was not the reason I gave her them.\n\nI did it purely and simply to please myself.\n\nI knew the profane old woman would not be at all concerned as to whether they had been bought with stolen money or not, and my only regret was that I had not had an opportunity to steal a larger sum so that I might have bought more chrysanthemums without inconveniencing my purse.\n\nBut as it was they filled her dirty little dwelling with perfume and color.\n\nLong ago, when I was six, I was a thief--only I was not then, as now, a graceful, light-fingered thief--I had not the philosophy of stealing.\n\nWhen I would steal a copper cent out of my mother’s pocketbook I would feel a dreadful, suffocating sinking in my bad heart, and for days and nights afterwards--long after I had eaten the chocolate mouse--the copper cent would haunt me and haunt me, and oh, how I wished it back in that pocketbook with the clasp shut tight and the bureau drawer locked!\n\nAnd so, is it not finer to be nineteen and a thief, with the philosophy of stealing--than to be six and haunted day and night by a copper cent?\n\nFor now always my only regret is, when I have stolen five dollars, that I did not steal ten while I was about it.\n\nIt is a long time ago since I was six."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "17 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "To-day I walked over the hill where the sun vanishes down in the afternoon.\n\nI followed the sun so far as I could, but two even very good legs can do no more than carry one into the midst of the sunshine--and then one may stand and take leave, lovingly, of it.\n\nI stood in the valley below the hill and looked away at the gold-yellow mountains that rise into the cloudy blue, and at the long gray stretches of rolling sand. It all reminded me of the Devil and the Happiness he will bring me.\n\nSome day the Devil will come to me and say: “Come with me.”\n\nAnd I will answer: “Yes.”\n\nAnd he will take me away with him to a place where it is wet and green--where the yellow, yellow sunshine falls on heaven-kissing hills, and misty, cloudy masses float over the valleys.\n\nAnd for days I shall be happy--happy--happy!\n\nFor days! The Devil and I will love each other intensely, perfectly--for days! He will be incarnate, but he will not be a man. He will be the man-devil, and his soul will take mine to itself and they will be one--for days.\n\nImagine me raised out of my misery and obscurity, dullness and Nothingness, into the full, brilliant life of the Devil--for days!\n\nThe love of the man-devil will enter into my barren, barren life and melt all the cold, hard things, and water the barrenness, and a million little green growing plants will start out of it; and a clear, sparkling spring will flow over it--through the dreary, sandy stretches of my bitterness, among the false stony roadways of my pain and hatred. And a great rushing, flashing cataract of melting love will flow over my weariness and unrest and wash it away forever. My soul will be fully awakened and there will be a million little sweet new souls in the green growing things. And they will fill my life with everything that is beautiful--tenderness, and divineness, and compassion, and exaltation, and uplifting grace, and light, and rest, and gentleness, and triumph, and truth, and peace. My life will be borne far out of self, and self will sink quietly out of sight--and I shall see it farther and farther away, until it disappears.\n\n“It is the last--the last--of that Mary MacLane,” I will say, and I will feel a long, sighing, quivering farewell.\n\nA thousand years of misery--and now a million years of Happiness.\n\nWhen the sun is setting in the valley and the crests of those heaven-kissing hills are painted violet and purple, and the valley itself is reeking and swimming in yellow-gold light, the man-devil--whom I love more than all--and I will go out into it.\n\nWe will be saturated in the yellow light of the sun and the gold light of Love.\n\nThe man-devil will say to me: “Look, you little creature, at this beautiful picture of Joy and Happiness. It is the picture of your life as it will be while I am with you--and I am with you for days.”\n\nAh, yes, I will take a last, long farewell of this Mary MacLane. Not one faint shadow of her weary wretched Nothingness will remain.\n\nThere will be instead a brilliant, buoyant, joyous creature--transformed, adorned, garlanded by the love of the Devil.\n\nMy mind will be a treasure-house of art, swept and garnished and strong and at its best.\n\nMy barren, hungry heart will come at last to its own. The red flames of the man-devil’s love will burn out forever its pitiable, distorted, wooden quality, and he will take it and cherish it--and give me his.\n\nMy young woman’s-body likewise will be metamorphosed, and I shall feel it developing and filled with myriads of little contentments and pleasures. Always my young woman’s-body is a great and important part of me, and when I am married to the Devil its finely-organized nerve-power and intricate sensibility will be culminated to marvelous completeness. My soul--upon my soul will descend consciously the light that never was on land or sea.\n\nThis will be for days--for days.\n\nNo matter what came before, I will say; no matter what comes afterward. Just now it is the man-devil, my best-beloved, and I, living in the yellow light.\n\nThink of living with the Devil in a bare little house, in the midst of green wetness and sweetness and yellow light--for days!\n\nIn the gray dawn it will be ineffably sweet and beautiful, with shining leaves and the gray, unfathomable air, and the wet grass, and all.\n\n“Be happy now, my weary little wife,” the Devil will say.\n\nAnd the long, long yellow-gold day will be filled with the music of Real Life.\n\nMy grandest possibility will be realized. The world contains a great many things--and this is my grandest possibility realized!\n\nI will weep rapturous tears.\n\nWhen I think of all this and write it there is in me a feeling that is more than pain.\n\nPerhaps the very sweetest, the tenderest, the most pitiful and benign human voice in the world could sing these things and this feeling set to their own wondrous music,--and it would echo far--far,--and you would understand."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "20 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "At times when I walk among the natural things--the barren, natural things--I know that I believe in Something. Why can I not call it God and pray to it?\n\nThere is Something--I do not know it intellectually, but I feel it--I feel it--with my soul. It does not seem to reach down to me. It does not pity me. It does not look at me tenderly in my unhappiness.\n\nMy soul feels only that it is there.\n\nNo. It is not all-loving, all-gracious, all-pitying. It hurts me--it hurts me always as I walk over the sand. But even while it hurts me it seems to promise--ah, those beautiful things that it promises me!\n\nAnd then the hurting is anguish--for I know that the promises will never be fulfilled.\n\nThere is within me a thing that is aching, aching, aching always as the days pass.\n\nIt is not my pain of wanting, nor my pain of unrest, nor my pain of bitterness, nor of hatred. I know those in all their own anguish.\n\nThis aching is another pain. It is a pain that I do not know--that I feel ignorantly but sharply, and, oh, it is torture, torture!\n\nMy soul is worn and weary with pain. There is no compassion--no mercy upon me. There is no one to help me bear it. It is just I alone out on the sand and barrenness. It is cruel anguish to be always alone--and so long--oh, so long!\n\nNineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen.\n\nWhen you are nineteen there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end.\n\nThis aching pain has no end.\n\nI feel no tears now, but I feel heavy sobs that shake my life to its center.\n\nMy soul is wandering in a wilderness.\n\nThere is a great light sometimes that draws my soul toward it. When my soul turns toward it, it shines out brilliant and dazzling and awful--and the worn, sensitive thing shrinks away, and shivers, and is faint.\n\nShall my soul have to know this Light, inevitably? Must it, some day, plunge into this?\n\nOh, it may be--it may be. But I know that I shall die with the pain.\n\nThere are times when the great Light is dim and beautiful as the starlight--the utter agony of it--the cruel, ineffable loveliness!\n\nDo you understand this? I am telling you my young, passionate life-agony? Do you listen to it indifferently? Has it no meaning for any one? For me it means everything. For me it makes life old, long, weariness.\n\nIt may be that you know. And perhaps you would even weep a little with me if you had time.\n\nIt is as if this Light were the light of the Christian religion--and the Christian religion is full of hatred. It says, “Come unto me, you that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” But when you would go, when you reach up with your weary hands, it sends you a too-brilliant Light--it makes you fair, wondrous promises--it puts you off. You beseech it in your suffering--\n\n“While the waters near me roll, While the tempest still is high--”\n\nbut it does not listen--it does not care. Worship me, worship me, it says, but after that let me alone. There is a bookful of promises. Take it and thank me and worship me.\n\nIt does not care.\n\nIf I obey it, it looks on indifferently. If I disobey it, it looks on indifferently. If I am in woe, it looks on indifferently. If I am in a brief joy, it looks on indifferently.\n\nI am left all alone--all alone.\n\nThe Light is shown me and I reach after it, but it is placed high out of my reach.\n\nI see the promises in the Light. Oh, why--why does it promise these things! Is not the burden of life already greater than I can bear? And there is the story of the Christ. It is beautiful. It is damningly beautiful. It draws the tears of pain and soft anguish from me at the sense of beauty. And when every nerve in me is melted and overflowing, then suddenly I am conscious that it is a lie--a lie.\n\nEverywhere I turn there is Nothing--Nothing.\n\nMy soul wails out its grief in loneliness.\n\nMy soul wanders hither and thither in the dark wilderness and asks, asks always in blind, dull agony, How long?--how long?"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "23 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I stand in the midst of my sand and barrenness and gaze hard at everything that is within my range of vision--and ruin my eyes trying to see into the darkness beyond.\n\nAnd nearly always I feel a vague contempt for you, fine, brave world--for you and all the things that I see from my barrenness. But I promise you, if some one comes from among you over the sunset hill one day with love for me, I will fall at your feet.\n\nI am a selfish, conceited, impudent little animal, it is true, but, after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of Wanting--and when some one comes over the barren hill to satisfy the wanting, I will be humble, humble in my triumph.\n\nIt is a difficult thing--a most difficult thing--to live on as one year follows another, from childhood slowly to womanhood, without one single sharer of your life--to be alone, always alone, when your one friend is gone. Oh, yes, it is hard! Particularly when one is not high-minded and spiritual, when one’s near longing is not a God and a religion, when one wants above all things the love of a human being--when one is a woman, young and all alone. Doubtless you know this. After all, fine brave world, there are some things that you know very well. Whether or not you care is a quite different matter.\n\nYou have the power to take this wooden heart in a tight, suffocating grasp. You have the power to do this with pain for me, and you have the power to do it with ravishing gentleness. But whether or not you will is another matter.\n\nYou may think evil of me before you have finished reading this. You will be very right to think so--according to your standards. But sometimes you see evil where there is no evil, and think evil when the only evil is in your own brains.\n\nMy life is a dry and barren life. You can change it.\n\n“Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away.”\n\nYes, you can change it. Stranger things have happened. Again, whether you will--that is a quite different thing.\n\nNo doubt you are the people and wisdom will die with you. I do not question that. I will admit and believe anything you may assert about yourselves. I do not want your wisdom, your judgment. I want some one to come up over the barren sunset hill. My thoughts are the thoughts of youth, which are said to be long, long thoughts.\n\nYour life is multi-colored and filled with people. My life is of the gray of sand and barrenness, and consists of Mary MacLane, the longing for Happiness, and the memory of the anemone lady.\n\nThis Portrayal is my deepest sincerity, my tears, my drops of red blood. Some of it is wrung from me--wrung by my ambition to tell everything. It is not altogether good that I should give you all this, since I do not give it for love of you. I am giving it in exchange for a few gayly-colored things. I want you to know all these passions and emotions. I give them with the utmost freedom. I shall be furious indeed if you do not take them. At the same time, the fact that I am exchanging my tears and my drops of red blood for your gayly-colored trifles is not a thing that thrills me with delight.\n\nBut it’s of little moment. When the Devil comes over the hill with Happiness I will rush at him frantically headlong--and nothing else will matter."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "25 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Mary MacLane--what are you, you forlorn, desolate little creature? Why are you not of and in the galloping herd? Why is it that you stand out separate against the background of a gloomy sky? Why can you not enter into the lives and sympathies of other young creatures? There have been times when you strained every despairing nerve to do so--before you realized that these things were not for you, that the only sympathy for you was that of Mary MacLane, and the only things for you were those you could take yourself--not which were given you. And your things are few, few, you starved, lean little mud-cat--you worn, youth-weary, obscure little genius!\n\nOh, it is a wearisome waiting--for the Devil."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "28 February 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "To-day when I walked over my sand and barrenness I felt Infinite Grief.\n\nEverything is beyond me.\n\nNothing is mine.\n\nMy single friendship shines brightly before me, and is fascinating--and always just out of my reach.\n\nI want the love and sympathy of human beings, and I repel human beings.\n\nYes, I repel human beings.\n\nThere is something about me that faintly and finely and unmistakably repels.\n\nWhen my Happiness comes, shall I be able to have it? Shall I ever have anything?\n\nThis repellent power is not an outward quality. It is something that comes from deeply, deeply within. It is something that was there in the Beginning. It is a thing from the Original.\n\nThere is no ridding myself of it. There is no ridding myself of it. There is no ridding myself of it.\n\nOh, I am damned--damned!\n\nThere is not one soul in the world to feel for me and with me--not one out of all the millions. No one can understand--no one.\n\nYou are saying to yourself that I imagine this.\n\nWhat right have you to say so? You don’t know anything about me. I know all about me. I have studied all the elements and phases in my life for years and years. I do not imagine anything. I am even fool enough to shut my eyes to some things until, inevitably, I know I must meet them. I am racked with the passions of youth, and I am young in years. Beyond that I am mature--old. I am not a child in anything but my passions and my years. I feel and recognize everything thoroughly. I have not to imagine anything. My inner life is before my eyes.\n\nThere is something about me that no one can understand. Can there ever be any one to understand? Shall I not always walk my barren road alone?\n\nThis follows me incessantly. It is burning like a smouldering fire every hour of my life.\n\nOh, deep black Despair!\n\nHow I suffer, how I suffer--just in being alive.\n\nI feel Infinite Grief.\n\nOh, Infinite Grief----"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "2 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Often in the early morning I leave my bed and get me dressed and go out into the Gray Dawn. There is something about the Gray Dawn that makes me wish the world would stop, that the sun would never more come up over the edge, that my life would go on and on and rest in the Gray Dawn.\n\nIn the Gray Dawn every hard thing is hidden by a gray mantle of charity, and only the light, vague, caressing fancies are left.\n\nSometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature--something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where there is nothing in touch with it, where life is a continual struggle, where every little door is closed--every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman’s-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman’s-body is laid in its grave.\n\nI felt this in the Gray Dawn this morning, but the gray charitable mantle softened it. Always I feel most acutely in the Gray Dawn, but always there is the thing to soften it.\n\nThe gray atmosphere was charged. There was a tense electrical thrill in the cold, soft air. My nerves were keenly alive. But the gray curtain was mercifully there. I did not feel too much.\n\nHow I wished the yellow, beautiful sun would never more come up over the edge to show me my nearer anguish!\n\n“Stay with me, stay with me, soft Gray Dawn,” implored every one of my tiny lives. “Let me forget. Let the vanity, the pain, the longing sink deep and vanish--all of it, all of it! And let me rest in the midst of the Gray Dawn.”\n\nI heard music--the silent music of myriad voices that you hear when all is still. One of them came and whispered to me softly: “Don’t suffer any more just now, little Mary MacLane. You suffer enough in the brightness of the sun and the blackness of the night. This is the Gray Dawn. Take a little rest.”\n\n“Yes,” I said, “I will take a little rest.”\n\nAnd then a wild, swelling chorus of voices whispered in the stillness: “Rest, rest, rest, little Mary MacLane. Suffer in the brightness, suffer in the blackness--your soul, your wooden heart, your woman’s-body. But now a little rest--a little rest.”\n\n“A little rest,” I said again.\n\nAnd straightway I began resting lest the sun should come too quickly over the edge.\n\nWhen I have heard in summer the wind in a forest of pines, blowing a wondrous symphony of purity and truth, my varied nature felt itself abashed and there was a sinking in my wooden heart. The beauty of it ravished my senses, but it savored crushingly of the virtue that is far above and beyond me, and I felt a certain sore, despairing grief.\n\nBut the Gray Dawn is in perfect sympathy. It is quite as beautiful as the wind in the pines, and its truth and purity are extremely gentle, and partly hidden under the gray curtain.\n\nAlmost I can be a different Mary MacLane out in the Gray Dawn. Let me forget all the mingled agonies of my life. Let me walk in the midst of this soft grayness and drink of the waters of Lethe.\n\nThe Gray Dawn is not Paradise; it is not a Happy Valley; it is not a Garden of Eden; it is not a Vale of Cashmere. It is the Gray Dawn--soft, charitable, tender. “The brilliant celestial yellow will come soon,” it says; “you will suffer then to your greatest extent. But now I am here--and so, rest.”\n\nAnd so in the Gray Dawn I was forgetting for a brief period. I was submerged for a little in Lethe, river of oblivion. If I had seen some one coming over the near horizon with Happiness I should have protested: Wait, wait until the Gray Dawn has passed.\n\nThe deep, deep blue of the summer sky stirs me to a half-painful joy. The cool green of a swiftly-flowing river fills my heart with unquiet longings. The red, red of the sunset sky convulses my entire being with passion. But the dear Gray Dawn brings me Rest.\n\nOh, the Gray Dawn is sweet--sweet!\n\nCould I not die for very love of it!\n\nThe Gray Dawn can do no wrong. If those myriad voices suddenly had begun to sing a voluptuous evil song of the so great evil that I could not understand, but that I could feel instantly, still the Gray Dawn would have been fine and sweet and beautiful.\n\nAlways I admire Mary MacLane greatly--though sometimes in my admiration I feel a complete contempt for her. But in the Gray Dawn I love Mary MacLane tenderly and passionately.\n\nI seem to take on a strange, calm indifference to everything in the world but just Mary MacLane and the Gray Dawn. We two are identified with each other and joined together in shadowy vagueness from the rest of the world.\n\nAs I walked over my sand and barrenness in the Gray Dawn a poem ran continuously through my mind. It expressed to me in my gray condition an ideal life and death and ending. Every desire of my life melted away in the Gray Dawn except one good wish that my own life and death might be short and obscure and complete like them. The poem was this beautiful one of Charles Kingsley’s:\n\n“‘Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, Across the sands of Dee!’ The western wind was wild and dank with foam, And all alone went she.\n\n“The creeping tide came up along the sand, And o’er and o’er the sand, And round and round the sand, As far as eye could see; The blinding mist came up and hid the land-- And never home came she.\n\n“Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floating hair?-- A tress of golden hair, Of drowned maiden’s hair, Above the nets at sea. Was never salmon yet that shone so fair Among the stakes on Dee.\n\n“They rowed her in across the rolling foam, The cruel, crawling foam, The cruel, hungry foam, To her grave beside the sea; But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home Across the sands of Dee.”\n\nThis is a poem perfect. And in the Gray Dawn it expresses to me a most desirable thing--a short, eventless life, a sudden ceasing, and a forgotten voice sometimes calling. This Mary, in the Gray Dawn, would wish nothing else. If the waters rolled over me now--over my short, eventless life--there would be the sudden ceasing,--and the anemone lady would hear my voice sometimes, and remember me--the anemone lady and one or two others. And after a short time even my pathetic, passionate voice would sound faint and be forgotten, and my world of sand and barrenness would know me and my weary little life-tragedy no more.\n\nAnd well for me, I say,--in the Gray Dawn.\n\nIt is different--oh, very different--when the yellow bursts through the gray. And the yellow is with me all day long, and at sunset--the red, red line!\n\nYet--oh, sweet Gray Dawn!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "5 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Sometimes I am seized with nearer, vivider sensations of love for my one friend, the anemone lady.\n\nShe is so dear--so beautiful!\n\nMy love for her is a peculiar thing. It is not the ordinary woman-love. It is something that burns with a vivid fire of its own. The anemone lady is enshrined in a temple on the inside of my heart that shall always only be hers.\n\nShe is my first love--my only dear one.\n\nThe thought of her fills me with a multitude of feelings, passionate yet wonderfully tender,--with delight, with rare, undefined emotions, with a suggestion of tears.\n\nOh, dearest anemone lady, shall I ever be able to forget your beautiful face! There may be some long, crowded years before me; it may be there will be people and people entering and departing--but, oh, no--no, I shall never forget! There will be in my life always--always the faint sweet perfume of the blue anemone: the memory of my one friend.\n\nBefore she went away, to see her, to be near her, was an event in my life--a coloring of the dullness. Always when I used to look at her there would rush a train of things over my mind, a vaguely glittering pageant that came only with her, and that held an always-vivid interest for me.\n\nThere were manifold and varied treasures in this train. There were skies of spangled sapphire, and there were lilies, and violets wet with dew. There was the music of violins, and wonderful weeds from the deep sea, and songs of troubadours, and gleaming white statues. There were ancient forests of oak and clematis vines; there were lemon-trees, and fretted palaces, and moss-covered old castles with moats and draw-bridges and tiny mullioned windows with diamond panes. There was a cold, glittering cataract of white foam, and a little green boat far off down the river, drifting along under drooping willows. There was a tree of golden apples, and a banquet in a beautiful house with the melting music of lutes and harps, and mulled orange-wine in tall, thin glasses. There was a field of long, fine grass, soft as bat’s-wool, and there were birds of brilliant plumage--scarlet and indigo with gold-tipped wings.\n\nAll these and a thousand fancies alike vaguely glittering would rush over me when I was with the anemone lady. Always my brain was in a gentle delirium. My nerves were unquiet.\n\nIt was because I love her.\n\nOh, there is not--there can never be--another anemone lady!\n\nMy life is a desert--a desert, but the thin, clinging perfume of the blue anemone reaches to its utter confines. And nothing in the desert is the same because of that perfume. Years will not fade the blue of the anemone, nor a thousand bitter winds blow away the rare fragrance.\n\nI feel in the anemone lady a strange attraction of sex. There is in me a masculine element that, when I am thinking of her, arises and overshadows all the others.\n\n“Why am I not a man,” I say to the sand and barrenness with a certain strained, tense passion, “that I might give this wonderful, dear, delicious woman an absolutely perfect love!”\n\nAnd this is my predominating feeling for her.\n\nSo, then, it is not the woman-love, but the man-love, set in the mysterious sensibilities of my woman-nature. It brings me pain and pleasure mingled in that odd, odd fashion.\n\nDo you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?\n\nOften I see coming across the desert a long line of light. My soul turns toward it and shrinks away from it as it does from all the lights. Some day, perhaps, all the lights will roll into one terrible white effervescence and rush over my soul and kill it. But this light does not bring so much of pain, for it is soft and silvery, and always with it is the Soul of Anemone."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "8 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "There are several things in the world for which I, of womankind and nineteen years, have conceived a forcible repugnance--or rather, the feeling was born in me; I did not have to conceive it.\n\nOften my mind chants a fervent litany of its own that runs somewhat like this:\n\nFrom women and men who dispense odors of musk; from little boys with long curls; from the kind of people who call a woman’s figure her “shape”: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom all sweet girls; from “gentlemen”; from feminine men: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom black under-clothing--and any color but white; from hips that wobble as one walks; from persons with fishy eyes; from the books of Archibald C. Gunter and Albert Ross: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom the soft persistent, maddening glances of water-cart drivers: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom lisle-thread stockings; from round, tight garters; from brilliant brass belts: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs “limbs”; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom unripe bananas; from bathless people; from a waist-line that slopes up in the front: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom an ordinary man; from a bad stomach, bad eyes, and bad feet: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom red note-paper; from a rhinestone-studded comb in my hair; from weddings: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom cod-fish balls; from fried egg plant, fried beef-steak, fried pork-chops, and fried French toast: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom wax flowers off a wedding-cake, under glass; from thin-soled shoes; from tape-worms; from photographs perched up all over my house: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom soft old bachelors and soft old widowers; from any masculine thing that wears a pale blue necktie; from agonizing elocutionists who recite “Curfew Shall Not Ring To-Night,” and “The Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine”; from a Salvation Army singing hymns in slang: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom people who persist in calling my good body “mere vile clay”; from idiots who appear to know all about me and enjoin me not to bathe my eyes in hot water since it hurts their own; from fools who tell me what I “want” to do: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom a nice young man; from tin spoons; from popular songs: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom pleasant old ladies who tell a great many uninteresting, obvious lies; from men with watch-chains draped across their middles; from some paintings of the old masters which I am unable to appreciate; from side-saddles: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom the kind of man who sings, “Oh, Promise Me!”--who sings at it; from constipated dressmakers; from people who don’t wash their hair often enough: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nFrom a servant girl with false teeth; from persons who make a regular practice of rubbing oily mixtures into their faces; from a bed that sinks in the middle: Kind Devil, deliver me.\n\nAnd so on and on and on. And in each petition I am deeply sincere. But, kind Devil, only bring me Happiness and I will more than willingly be annoyed by all these things. Happiness for two days, kind Devil, and then, if you will, languishing widowers, lisle-thread stockings--anything, for the rest of my life.\n\nAnd hurry, kind Devil, pray--for I am weary."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "9 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "It is astonishing to me how very many contemptible, petty vanities are lodged in the crevices of my genius. My genius itself is one grand good vanity--but it is not contemptible. And even those little vanities--though they are contemptible, I do not hold them in contempt by any means. I smile involuntarily at their absurdness sometimes, but I know well that they have their function.\n\nThey are peculiarly of my mind, my humanness, and they are useful therein. When this mind stretches out its hand for things and finds only wilderness and Nothingness all about it, and draws the hand back empty, then it can only turn back--like my soul--to itself. And it finds these innumerable little vanities to quiet it and help it. My soul has no vanity, and it has nothing, nothing to quiet it. My soul is wearing itself out, eating itself away. These vanities are a miserable substitute for the rose-colored treasures that it sees a great way off and even imagines in its folly that it may have, if it continues to reach after them. Yet the vanities are something. They prevent my erratic, analytical mind from finding a great Nothing when it turns back upon itself.\n\nIf I were not so unceasingly engrossed with my sense of misery and loneliness my mind would produce beautiful, wonderful logic. I am a genius--a genius--a genius. Even after all this you may not realize that I am a genius. It is a hard thing to show. But, for myself, I feel it. It is enough for me that I feel it.\n\nI am not a genius because I am foreign to everything in the world, nor because I am intense, nor because I suffer. One may be all of these and yet not have this marvelous perceptive sense. My genius is because of nothing. It was born in me as germs of evil were born in me. And mine is a genius that has been given to no one else. The genius itself enables me to be thoroughly convinced of this.\n\nIt is hopeless, never-ending loneliness!\n\nMy ancestors in their Highlands--some of them--were endowed with second sight. My genius is not in the least like second sight. That savors of the supernatural, the mysterious. My genius is a sound, sure, earthly sense, with no suggestion of mystery or occultism. It is an inner sense that enables me to feel and know things that I could not possibly put into thought, much less into words. It makes me know and analyze with deadly minuteness every keen, tiny damnation in my terrible lonely life. It is a mirror that shows me myself and something in myself in a merciless brilliant light, and the sight at once sickens and maddens me and fills me with an unnamed woe. It is something unspeakably dreadful. The sight for the time deadens all thought in my mind. It freezes my reason and intellect. Logic can not come to my aid. I can only feel and know the thing and it analyzes itself before my eyes.\n\nI am alone with this--alone, alone, alone! There is no pitiful hand extended from the heights--there is no human being--ah, there is Nothing.\n\nHow can I bear it! Oh, I ask you--how can I bear it!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "10 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "My genius is an element by itself, and it is not a thing that I can tell in so many words. But it makes itself felt in every point of my life. This book would be a very different thing if I were not a genius--though I am not a literary genius. Often people who come in contact with me and hear me utter a few commonplace remarks feel at once that I am extraordinary.\n\nI am extraordinary.\n\nI have tried longingly, passionately, to think that even this sand and barrenness is mine. But I can not. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it, like all good things, is beyond me. It has something that I also have. In that is our bond of sympathy.\n\nBut the sand and barrenness itself is not mine.\n\nAlways I think there is but one picture in the world more perfect in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness. It is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves. Nothing could be more divinely appropriate. The art in it is ravishingly perfect. It is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world for all time. As I see it before my mind I can think only of its utter perfectness. I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed. The deed and the art are perfect. Its perfectness ravishes my senses.\n\nAnd within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and barrenness--knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine--is only second to it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "11 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Sometimes when I go out on the barrenness my mind wanders afar.\n\nTo-day it went to Greece.\n\nOh, it was very beautiful in Greece!\n\nThere was a wide, long sky that was vividly, wonderfully blue. And there was a limitless sea that was gray and green. And it went far to the south. The sky and the sea spread out into the vast world--two beautiful elements, and they fell in love with each other. And the farther away they were the nearer they moved together until at last they met and clasped each other in the far distance. There were tall, dark-green trees of kinds that are seen only in Greece. They murmured and whispered in the stillness. The wind came off from the sea and went over them and around them. They quivered and trembled in shy, ecstatic joy--for the wind was their best-beloved. There were banks of moss of a deep emerald color, and golden flowers that drooped their heavy sensual heads over to the damp black earth. And they also loved each other, and were with each other, and were glad. Clouds hung low over the sea and were dark-gray and heavy with rain. But the sun shone from behind them at intervals with beams of bronze-and-copper. Three white rocks rose up out of the sea, and the bronze-and-copper beams fell upon them, and straightway they were of gold.\n\nOh, how beautiful were those three gold rocks that came up out of the sea!\n\nAphrodite once came up out of this same sea. She came gleaming, with golden hair and beautiful eyes. Her skin glowed with tints of carmine and wild rose. Her white feet touched the smooth, yellow sand on the shore. The white feet of Aphrodite on the yellow sand made a picture of marvelous beauty. She was flushed in the joy of new life.\n\nBut the bronze-and-copper sunshine on the three white rocks was more beautiful than Aphrodite.\n\nI stood on the shore and looked at the rocks. My heart contracted with the pain that beautiful things bring.\n\nThe bronze-and-copper in the wide gray and green sea!\n\n“This is the gateway of Heaven,” I said to myself. “Behind those three gold rocks there is music and the high notes of happy voices.” My soul grew faint. “And there is no sand and barrenness there, and no Nothingness, and no bitterness, and no hot, blinding tears. And there are no little heart-weary children, and no lonely young women--oh, there is no loneliness at all!” My soul grew more and more faint with thinking of it. “And there is no heart there but that is pure and joyous and in Peace--in long, still, eternal Peace. And every life comes there to its own; and every earth-cry is answered, and every earth-pain is ended; and the dark spirit of Sorrow that hangs always over the earth is gone--gone,--beyond the gateway of Heaven. And more than all, Love is there and walks among the dwellers. Love is a shining figure with radiant hands, and it touches them all with its hands so that never-dying love enters into their hearts. And the love of each for another is like the love of each for self. And here at last is Truth. There is searching and searching over the earth after Truth--and who has found it? But here is it beyond the gateway of Heaven. Those who enter in know that it is Truth at last.”\n\nAnd so Peace and Love and Truth are there behind the three gold rocks.\n\nAnd then my soul could no longer endure the thought of it.\n\nSuddenly the sun passed behind a heavy, dark-gray cloud, and the bronze-and-copper faded from the three rocks and left them white--very white in the wide water.\n\nThe yellow flowers laid their heads drowsily down on the emerald moss. The wind from off the sea played very gently among the motionless branches of the tall trees. The blue, blue sky and the wide, gray-green sea clasped each other more closely and mingled with each other and became one vague, shadowy element--and from it all I brought my eyes back thousands of leagues to my sand and barrenness.\n\nThe sand and barrenness is itself an element, and I have known it a long, long time."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "12 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Everything is so dreary--so dreary.\n\nI feel as if I would like to die to-day. I should not be the tiniest bit less unhappy afterward--but this life is unutterably weary. I am not strong. I can not bear things. I do not want to bear things. I do not long for strength. I want to be happy.\n\nWhen I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought,--and one would not be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it was just exactly as lonesome. And when I was ten everything was very hard to understand.\n\nBut it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said. I will know so much when I am seventeen. But when I was seventeen it was even more lonely, and everything was still harder to understand.\n\nAnd again I said--faintly--everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been--and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.\n\nFor I know that it will not be different.\n\nI know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.\n\nIt is very, very lonely.\n\nIt is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick.\n\nIt is more than I can bear.\n\nWhy--why was I ever born!\n\nI can not live, and I can not die--for what is there after I am dead? I can see myself wandering in dark and lonely places.\n\nYet I feel as if I would like to die to-day."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "13 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "If it were pain alone that one must bear, one could bear it. One could lose one’s sense of everything but pain.\n\nBut it is pain with other things. It is the sense of pain with the sense of beauty and the sense of the anemone. And there is that mysterious pain.\n\nWho knows the name of that mysterious pain?\n\nIt is these mingled senses that torture me."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "14 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I have been placed in this world with eyes to see and ears to hear, and I ask for Life. Is it to be wondered at? Is it so strange? Should I be content merely to see and to hear? There are other things for other people. Is it atrocious that I should ask for some other things also?\n\nIs thy servant a dog?"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "15 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "In these days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.\n\nMy sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once--green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness, and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness--it is only itself. It has a great self, a wonderful self.\n\nI shall never forget you, my sand and barrenness.\n\nSome day, shall my thirsty life be watered, my starved heart fed, my asking voice answered, my tired soul taken into the warmth of another with the intoxicating sweetness of love?\n\nIt may be.\n\nBut I shall remember the sand and barrenness that is with me in my Nothingness. The sand and barrenness and the memory of the anemone lady are all that are in any degree mine.\n\nAnd so then I shall remember it.\n\nAs I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half-tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship--a thing that is earth-old.\n\nIt is beyond me, and it is nothing to me.\n\nIn my intensest desires--in my widest longings--I never go beyond self. The ego is the all.\n\nLimitless legions of women and men in weariness and in joy are one. They are killing each other and torturing each other, and going down in sorrow to the dust. But they are one. Their right hands are joined in unseen sympathy and kinship.\n\nBut my two hands are apart, and clasped together in an agony of loneliness.\n\nI have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.\n\nTo be saturated with this agony, I say at times, and to bear with it all; not to sink beneath it, but to vanquish it, and to make it the grace and comeliness of my entire life from the Beginning to the End!\n\nPerhaps a woman--a real woman--could do this.\n\nBut I?--No. I am not real--I do not seem real to myself. In such things as these my life is a blank.\n\nThere was Charlotte Corday--a heroine whom I admire above all the heroines. And more than she was a heroine she was a woman. And she had her agony. It was for love of her fair country.\n\nTo suffer and do and die for love of something! It is glorious! What must be the exalted ecstasy of Charlotte Corday’s soul now!\n\nAnd I--with all my manifold passions--I am a coward.\n\nI have had moments when, vaguely and from far off, it seemed as if there might be bravery and exaltation for me,--when I could rise far over myself. I have felt unspeakable possibilities. While they lasted--what wonderful emotion was it that I felt?\n\nBut they are not real.\n\nThey fade away--they fade away.\n\nAnd again come the varied phenomena of my life to bewilder and terrify me.\n\nConfusion! Chaos! Damnation! They are not moments of exaltation now. Poor little Mary MacLane!\n\n“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”\n\nI do not know what to do.\n\nI do not know what were good to do.\n\nI would do nothing if I knew.\n\nI might add to my litany this: Most kind Devil, deliver me--from myself."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "16 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "To-day I walked over the sand, and it was almost beautiful. The sun was sinking and the sky was filled with roses and gold.\n\nThen came my soul and confronted me. My soul is wondrous fair. It is like a young woman. The beauty of it is too great for human eyes to look upon. It is too great for mine. Yet I look.\n\nMy soul said to me: “I am sick.”\n\nI answered: “And I am sick.”\n\n“We may be well,” said my soul. “Why are we not well?”\n\n“How may we be well?” I asked.\n\n“We may throw away all our vanity and false pride,” said my soul. “We way take on a new life. We may learn to wait and to possess ourselves in patience. We may labor and overcome.”\n\n“We can do none of these things,” I cried. “Have I not tried all of them some time in my short life? And have I not waited and wanted until you have become faint with pain? Have I not looked and longed? Dear soul, why do you not resign yourself? Why can you not stay quiet and trouble yourself and me no more? Why are you always straining and reaching? There isn’t anything for you. You are wearing yourself out.”\n\nMy soul made answer: “I may strain and reach until only one worn nerve of me is left. And that one nerve may be scourged with whips and burned with fire. But I will keep one atom of faith. I may go bad, but I will keep one atom of faith in Love and in the Truth that is Love. You are a genius, but I am no genius. The years--a million of years--may do their utmost to destroy the single nerve. They may lash and beat it. I will keep my one atom of faith.”\n\n“You are not wise,” I said. “You have been wandering and longing for a time that seems a thousand years--through my cold, dark childhood to my cold, dark womanhood. Is that not enough to quiet you? Is that not enough to teach you the lesson of Nothing? You are not a genius, but you are not a fool.”\n\n“I will keep my one atom of faith,” said my soul.\n\n“But lie and sleep now,” I said. “Don’t reach after that Light any more. Let us both sleep a few years.”\n\n“No,” said my soul.\n\n“Oh, my soul,” I wailed, “look away at that glowing copper horizon--and beyond it. Let us go there now and take an infinite rest. Now! We can bear this no longer.”\n\n“No,” said my soul; “we will stay here and bear more. There would be no rest yet beyond the copper horizon. And there is no need of going anywhere. I have my one atom of faith.”\n\nI gazed at my soul as it stood plainly before me, weak and worn and faint, in the fading light. It had one atom of faith, it said, and tried to hold its head high and to look strong and triumphant. Oh, the irony--the pathos of it!\n\nMy soul, with its one pitiful atom of faith, looked only what it was--a weeping, hunted thing."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "17 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "In some rare between-whiles it is as if nothing mattered. My heart aches, I say; my soul wanders; this person or that person was repelled to-day; but nothing matters.\n\nA great inner languor comes like a giant and lays hold of me. I lie fallow beneath it.\n\nSome one forgot me in the giving of things. But it does not matter. I feel nothing.\n\nPersons say to me, don’t analyze any more and you will not be unhappy.\n\nWhen Something throws heavy clubs at you and you are hit by them, don’t be hurt. When Something stronger than you holds your hands in the fire, don’t let it burn you. When Something pushes you into a river of ice, don’t be cold. When something draws a cutting lash across your naked shoulders, don’t let it concern you--don’t be conscious that it is there.\n\nThis is great wisdom and fine, clear logic.\n\nIt is a pity that no one has ever yet been able to live by it.\n\nBut after all it’s no matter. Nothing is any one’s affair. It is all of no consequence.\n\nAnd have I not had all my anguish for nothing? I am a fool--a fool.\n\nA handful of rich black mud in a pig’s yard--does it wonder why it is there? Does it torture itself about the other mud around it, and about the earth and water of which it is made, and about the pig? Only fool’s mud would do so. And so, then, I am fool’s mud.\n\nNothing counts. Nothing can possibly count.\n\nRegret, passion, cowardice, hope, bravery, unrest, pain, the love-sense, the soul-sense, the beauty-sense--all for nothing! What can a handful of rich black mud in a pig’s yard have to do with these? I am a handful of rich black mud--a fool-woman, fool’s mud.\n\nAll on earth that I need to do is to lie still in the hot sun and feel the pig rolling and floundering and slushing about. It were folly to waste my mud nerves in wondering. Be quiet, fool-woman, let things be. Your soul is a fool’s-mud soul and is governed by the pig; your heart is a fool’s-mud heart, and wants nothing beyond the pig; your life is a fool’s-mud life, and is the pig’s life.\n\nSomething within me shrieks now, but I do not know what it is--nor why it shrieks.\n\nIt groans and moans.\n\nThere is no satisfaction in being a fool--no satisfaction at all."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "18 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "But yes. It all matters, whether or no. Nature is one long battle, and the never-ending perishing of the weak. I must grind and grind away. I have no choice. And I must know that I grind.\n\nFool, genius, young lonely woman--I must go round and round in the life within, for how many years the Devil knows. After that my soul must go round and round, for how many centuries the Devil knows.\n\nWhat a master-mind is that of the Devil! The world is a wondrous scheme. For me it is a scheme that is black with woe. But there may be in the world some one who finds it beautiful Real Life.\n\nI wonder as I write this Portrayal if there will be one person to read it and see a thing that is mingled with every word. It is something that you must feel, that must fascinate you, the like of which you have never before met with.\n\nIt is the unparalleled individuality of me.\n\nI wish I might write it in so many words of English. But that is not possible. If I have put it in every word and if you feel it and are fascinated, then I have done very well.\n\nI am marvelously clever if I have done so.\n\nI know that I am marvelously clever. But I have need of all my peculiar genius to show you my individuality--my aloneness.\n\nI am alone out on my sand and barrenness. I should be alone if my sand and barrenness were crowded with a thousand people each filled with melting sympathy for me--though it would be unspeakably sweet.\n\nPeople say of me, “She’s peculiar.” They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.\n\nAnd so I try to put my individuality in the quality of my diction, in my method of handling words.\n\nMy conversation plainly shows this individuality--more than shows it, indeed. My conversation hurls it violently at people’s heads. My conversation--when I choose--makes people turn around in their chairs and stare and give me all of their attention. They admire me, though their admiration is mixed decidedly with other feelings.\n\nI like to be admired.\n\nIt soothes my vanity.\n\nWhen you read this Portrayal you will admire me. You will surely have to admire me.\n\nAnd so this is life, and everything matters.\n\nBut just now I will stop writing and go downstairs to my dinner. There is a porterhouse steak, broiled rare, and some green young onions. Oh, they are good! And when one is to have a porterhouse steak for one’s dinner--and some green young onions, one doesn’t give a tupenny dam whether anything else matters or not."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "19 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "On a day when the sky is like lead and a dull, tempestuous wilderness of gray clouds adds a dreariness to the sand, there is added to the loneliness of my life a deep bitterness of gall and wormwood.\n\nOut of my bitterness it is easy for bad to come.\n\nSurely Badness is a deep black pool wherein one may drown dullness and Nothingness.\n\nI do not know Badness well. It is something material that seems a great way off now, but that might creep nearer and nearer as I became less and less young.\n\nBut now when the day is of the leaden dullness I look at Badness and long for it. I am young and all alone, and everything that is good is beyond my reach. But all that is bad--surely that is within the reach of every one.\n\nI wish for a long pageant of bad things to come and whirl and rage through this strange leaden life of mine and break the spell.\n\nWhy should it not be Badness instead of Death? Death, it seems, will bring me but a change of agony. Badness would perhaps so crowd my life with its vivid phenomena that they would act as a neurotic to the racked nerves of my Nothingness. It would be an outlet--and possibly I could forget some things.\n\nI think just now of a woman who lived long ago and in whom the world at large seems not to have found anything admirable. I mean Messalina Valeria, the wife of the stupid emperor Claudius. I have conceived a profound admiration for this historic wanton. She may not indeed have had anything to forget; she may not have suffered. But she had the strength of will to take what she wanted, to do as she liked, to live as she chose to live.\n\nIt is admirable and beautiful beyond expression to sacrifice and give up and wait for love of that good that gives in itself a just reward. And only next to this is the throwing to the winds of all restraint when the good holds itself aloof and gives nothing. We are weak, contemptible fools who do not grasp the resources within our reach when there is no just reward for our restraint. Why do we not take what we want of the various temptations? It is not that we are virtuous. It is that we are cowards.\n\nAnd it is worth while to remain true to an ideal that offers only the vaguest hopes of realization? It is not philosophy. When one has made up one’s mind that one wants a dish of hot stewed mushrooms, and set one’s heart on it, should one scorn a handful of raw evaporated apples, if one were starving, for the sake of the phantom dish of hot stewed mushrooms? Should one say, Let me starve, but I will never descend to evaporated apples; I will have nothing but a dish of hot stewed mushrooms? If one is sure one will have the stewed mushrooms finally, before one dies of starvation, then very well. One should wait for them and take nothing else.\n\nBut it is not in my good peripatetic philosophy to pass by the Badness that the gods provide for the sake of a far-away, always-unrealized ideal, however brilliant, however beautiful, however golden.\n\nWhen the lead is in the sky and in my life, a vision of Badness looms up on the horizon and looks at me and beckons with a fascinating finger. Then I say to myself, What is the use of this unsullied, struggling soul; this unbesmirched, empty heart; this treasureless, innocent mind; this insipid maid’s-body? There are no good things for them. But here, to be sure, are fascinating, glittering bad things--the goods that the gods provide, the compensation of the Devil.\n\nComes Death, some day, I said--but to die, in the sight of glittering bad things--and I only nineteen! These glittering things appear fair.\n\nThere is really nothing evil in the world. Some things appear distorted and unnatural because they have been badly done. Had they been perfect in conception and execution they would strike one only with admiration at their fine, iridescent lights. You remember Don Juan and Haidee. That, to be sure, was not evil in any event--they loved each other. But if they had had only a passing, if intense, fancy for one another, who would call it evil? Who would call it anything but wonderful, charming, enchanting? The Devil’s bad things--like the Devil’s good things--may gleam and glisten, oh, how they may gleam and glisten! I have seen them do so, not only in a poem of Byron’s, but in the life that is.\n\nAlways when the lead is in the sky I would like to cultivate thoroughly this branch of the vineyard. Now doesn’t it make you shiver to think of this dear little Mary MacLane wandering unloved through dark by-ways and deadly labyrinths? It makes me shiver. But it needn’t. If I am to wander unloved, why not as well wander there as through Nothingness?\n\nI fancy it must be wonderfully easy to become used to the many-sided Badness. I have lived my nineteen years in the midst of Nothingness, and I have not yet become used to it. It has sharp knives in it, has Nothingness. Badness may have some sharp knives also--but there are other things. Yes, there are other things.\n\nKind Devil, if you are not to fetch me Happiness, then slip off from your great steel key-ring a bright little key to the door of the glittering, gleaming bad things, and give it me, and show me the way, and wish me joy.\n\nI would like to live about seven years of judicious Badness, and then Death, if you will. Nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, seven years of judicious Badness--and then Death. A noble ambition! But might it not be worse? If not that, then nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, and then Death. No; when the lead is in the sky that does not appeal to me. My versatile mind turns to the seven years of judicious Badness.\n\nThere is nothing in the world without its element of Badness. It is in literature; it is in every art--in pictures, sculpture, even in music. There are certain fine, deep, minute passages in Beethoven and in Chopin that tell of things wonderfully, sublimely bad. Chopin one can not understand. Is there any one in the world who can understand him? But we know at once that there is the Badness--and it is music!\n\nThere is the element of Badness in me.\n\nI long to cultivate my element of Badness. Badness compared to Nothingness is beautiful. And so, then, I wait also for some one to come over the hill with things other than Happiness. But whatever I wait for, nothing comes."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "20 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "There were pictures in the red sunset sky to-day. I looked at them and was racked with passions of desire. I fancied to myself that I could have any of the good things in the pictures for the asking and the waiting. The while I knew that when the sunset should fade from the sky I would be overwhelmed by my heaviest woe.\n\nThere was a picture of intense peace. There were stretches of flat, green country, and oak-trees and aspens, and a still, still lake. In the dim distance you could see fields of wheat and timothy-grass that moved a little as if in the wind. You could fancy the cows feeding just below the brow of the near hills, and a hawk floating and wheeling among the clouds. A rainbow arched over the lake. There is nothing lacking here, I thought. “Life and health and peace possessing.” Give me this, kind Devil.\n\nThere was a picture of endless, limitless strength. There were the oak-trees again but bereft now of every leaf, and the bristling, jagged rocks back of them were not more coldly staunch. The sun poured brilliantly bright upon them. A river flowed unmoved and quiet between yellow clay banks. A tornado might sweep over this and not one twig would be displaced, not one ripple would come to the river. Is it not fine! I said to myself. No feeling, no self-analysis, no aching, no pain--and the strength of the Philistines. Oh, kind Devil, I entreat you, let me have that!\n\nThere was a picture of untrammeled revel and forgetfulness. There were fields of swaying daffodils and red lilies. The young shrubs tossed their heads and were joyous. Lambs gamboled and the happy meadow-lark knew whereof she sang.\n\n“The winds with wonder whist Smoothly the waters kissed.”\n\nBe carefree, be light-hearted, be wicked--above all, forget. The deeds are what you will; the time is now; the aftermath is nothing; the day of reckoning is never. Love things lightly, take all that you see, and to the winds with regret! Gracious Devil, I whispered intensely, give me this and no other!\n\nThere was a picture of raging elements. “The winds blew, and the rains descended and the floods came.” The sky was overcast with rolling clouds. The air was heavy with unrest. There was a gray stone house set upon a rocky point, and I had momentary glimpses of an unquiet sea below it. Back on the surface of the land slender trees were waving wildly in the gale. The wind and the rain were saying, “Damn you, little earth, I have you now,--I will rend and ruin you.” They whipped and raged in frenzied joy. The little earth liked it. The elements whirled and whistled round the gray stone house. A lurid light came from a ghastly moon between clouds. The entire scene was desolately savage and forlorn, but attractive. As I listened in fancy to that shrieking, wailing wind, and saw green branches jerked and twisted asunder in the storm, my barren, defrauded heart leaped and exulted. If I could live in the midst of this and be beaten and shaken roughly, would not that deep sense forget to ache? Kind Devil, pray send me some storms. It is Nothingness that bears down heavy.\n\nThere was a picture of an exalted spiritual life. There was that strange bright light. And the things in the picture were those things alone in this world that are real, and the only things that count. The old, soft green of the old, old rolling hills was the green of love--the earth-love and the love that comes from beyond the earth. The air and the blue water and the sunshine were so beautifully real and true that except for their deep-reaching, passionate tenderness human strength could not endure them. There were lanes of climbing vines and white violets. Was it my fancy that brought their thin fragrance to me over piles of billowy clouds? There was something there that was old--old as the race. Those green valleys were the same as when the mists first lifted from the earth. As I looked my life stood still. My soul shivered faintly. As I looked I felt nearer, my God, to thee--though I have no God and everything is away from me, nothing tender comes to me.\n\nStill it was nearer, my God, to thee.\n\nA voice came out of the far, far distant ages and said very gently: “All these shadows are falling in vain. You are blinded and bewildered in the darkness--the darkness is deep--deep. There is not one dim ray of light. Your feet falter and stumble. You can not see. But the shadows are falling in vain.”\n\nI ask you, Why is this life not mine?\n\nI implore and wring my hands in agonized entreaty, and almost it seems sometimes my fingers can grasp these things--but there is something cold and strong between them and me. Oh, what is it!\n\nThere was a picture of various castles in Spain. They were most beautiful, were those castles. The lights that shone on the battlements were soft, bright lights. For one thing, I fancied I saw myself and Fame with me. Fame is very fine. The sun and moon and stars may go dark in the Heavens. Bitter rain may fall out of the clouds. But never mind. Fame has a sun and moon and gently brilliant stars of her own, and these, shining once, shine always. The green river may run dry in the land. But Fame has a green river that never runs dry. One may wander over the face of the earth. But Fame is herself a refuge. One may be a target for stones and mud. Yes--but Fame stands near with her arm laid across one’s shoulders--as no other arm can be laid across one’s shoulders. Fame would fill several empty places. Fame would continue to fill them for some years.\n\nFame, if you please, Devil.\n\nThere was a picture of Death. I saw a figure lying in the midst of a desert that was rather like my sand and barrenness. Not far off a wolf sat on his haunches and waited for the end. A buzzard perched near and waited also. They both appeared hungry. It seemed as though the end might come quickly.\n\nLet it come, kind Devil.\n\nAnd a wolf and a buzzard are better than an undertaker and some worms. Although that doesn’t much matter.\n\nAnd oh, there again was the dearest picture of all--the red, red picture of Happiness for me, Happiness with the sunshine falling on the Heaven-kissing hills! There was I, and I loved and was loved. I--out of loneliness into perfect Happiness! The yellow-gold of the glorious hot sun melted and poured over the earth and over everything that was there. The river ran and rippled and sang the most sweetly glad song that ever river sang. Winged things sparkled in the gold light and flew down the sky. “The wonderful air was over me; the wonderful wind was shaking the tree.” The silent voices in the air rang out like flutes and clarionets. And the love of the man-devil for me was everywhere--above me, around me, within me. It would last for a number of beautiful yellow-gold days. I--out of the anguish of loneliness into this!\n\nMy heart is filled with desire.\n\nMy soul is filled with passion.\n\nMy life is a life of longing.\n\nAll pictures fade before this picture. They fade completely. When the sun itself faded I gazed over my sand and barrenness with blurred, unseeing eyes and wished only with a heavy, desolate spirit for the coming of the Devil."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "21 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Some people think, absurdly enough, that to be Scotch or descended from the Scottish clans is to be rather strong, rather conservative, firm in faith, and all that. The idea is one that should be completely exploded by this time. I think that the Scotch as a nation are the most difficult of all to characterize. Their traits and tendencies cover a wider field than those of any other. To be Scotch is to be anything. There is no man so narrow as a Scotchman. There is no man so broad as a Scotchman. There is no mind so versatile as a Scotch mind. At the same time only a Scotch mind is capable of clinging with bull-dog tenacity to one idea. A Scotch heart out of all, and through all, can be true as death. A Scotch heart--the same one--can be cunning and treacherous as false human hearts are made. To be English is to have limits; the Germans, the French, the Russians--they have all some inevitable attributes to modify their genius.\n\nBut one may be anything--anything, if one is Scotch.\n\nAlways I think of the cruel, hardened, ferocious, weather-beaten, kilted Clan MacLean wandering over bleak winter hills, fighting the powerful MacDonalds and MacGregors--and generally wiping them from the earth,--marching away with merrily shrieking pipes from fields of withered, blood-soaked heather--and all this merely to gather intensified life for me. I feel that the causes of my tragedy began long, long ago from remote germs.\n\nMy Scotch blood added to my genius sense has made me into a dangerous chemical compound. By analyzing I have brought an almost clear portrait of myself up before my mind’s eyes.\n\nWhen I was a child I did not analyze knowingly, but the child was this same genius, though I am one of the kind that changes widely and decidedly in the years. This weary unhappiness is not a matter of development.\n\nWhen I was a child I felt dumbly what I feel now less dumbly. At the age of five I used sometimes to weep silently in the night--I did not know why. It was that I felt my aloneness, my foreignness to all things. I felt the heavy, heavy weight of life--and I was only five.\n\nI was only five, and it seems a thousand years ago. But sometimes back through the long, winding, unused passages of my mind I hear that silent sobbing of the child and the unarmed wailing of a tiny, tired soul.\n\nIt mingles with the bitter Nothingness of the grown young woman, and oh, with it all--with it all I am so unhappy!\n\nThere is something subtly Scotch in all this.\n\nBut Scotch or Indian or Japanese, there is no stopping of the pain."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "22 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I fear, do you know, fine world, that you do not yet know me really well--particularly me of the flesh. Me of the peculiar philosophy and the unhappy spirit you know rather well by now, unless you are stupider than I think you are. But you might pass me in the street--you might spend the day with me--and never suspect that I am I. Though for the matter of that, even if I had set before you a most graphic and minutely drawn portrait of myself, I am certainly clever enough to act a quite different rôle if I chose--when you came to spend the day. Still, if the world at large is to know me as I desire it to know me without ever seeing me, I shall have to bring myself into closer personal range with it--and you may rise in your seats and focus your opera-glasses, stare with open mouths, stand on your hind-legs and gape--I will myself turn on glaring green and orange lights from the wings.\n\nI believe that it’s the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively. In “Vanity Fair,” when Beckey Sharpe was describing young Crawley in a letter to her friend Amelia, she stated that he had hay-colored whiskers and straw-colored hair. And knowing this you feel that you know much more about the Crawley than you would if Miss Sharpe had not mentioned those things. And yet it is but a mere matter of color!\n\nWhen you think that Dickens was extremely fond of cats you feel at once that nothing could be more fitting. Somehow that marvelously mingled humor and pathos and gentle irony seem to go exceedingly well with a fondness for soft, green-eyed, purring things. If you had not read the pathetic humor, but knew about Dickens and his warm feline friends you might easily expect such things from him.\n\nWhen you read somewhere that Dr. Johnson is said never to have washed his neck and his ears, and then go and read some of his powerful, original philosophy, you say to yourself, “Yes, I can readily believe that this man never troubled himself to wash his neck and his ears.” I, for my part, having read some of the things he has written, can not reconcile myself to the fact that he ever washed any part of his anatomy. I admire Dr. Johnson--though I wash my own neck occasionally.\n\nWhen you think of Napoleon amusing himself by taking a child on his knee and pinching it to hear it cry, you feel an ecstatic little wave of pleasure at the perfect fitness of things. You think of his hard, brilliant, continuous victories, and you suspect that Napoleon Bonaparte lived but to gratify Napoleon Bonaparte. When you think of the heavy, muscular man smilingly pinching the child, you are quite sure of it. Such a method of amusement for that king among men is so exquisitely appropriate that you wonder why you had not thought of it yourself.\n\nSo, then, yes. I believe strenuously in the efficacy of seemingly trivial facts as portrayers of one’s character--one’s individual humanness.\n\nNow I will set down for your benefit divers and varied observations relative to me--an interesting one of womankind and nineteen years, and curious and fascinating withal.\n\nWell, then.\n\nNearly every day I make me a plate of hot, rich fudge, with brown sugar (I should be an entirely different person if I made it with white sugar--and the fudge would not be nearly so good), and take it upstairs to my room, with a book or a newspaper. My mind then takes in a part of what is contained in the book or the newspaper, and the stomach of the MacLane takes in all of what is contained in the plate. I sit by my window in a miserable, uncomfortable, stiff-backed chair, but I relieve the strain by resting my feet on the edge of the low bureau. Usually the book that I read is an old dilapidated bound volume of that erstwhile periodical, “Our Young Folks.” It is a thing that possesses a charm for me. I never grow tired of it. As I eat my nice brown little squares of fudge I read about a boy whose name is Jack Hazard and who, J. T. Trowbridge informs the reader, is doing his best, and who seems to find it somewhat difficult. I believe I could repeat pages of J. T. Trowbridge from memory, and that ancient bound volume has become a part of my life. I stop reading after a few minutes, but I continue to eat--and gaze at the toes of my shoes which need polishing badly, or at the conglomeration of brilliant pictures on my bedroom wall, or out of the window at the children playing in the street. But mostly I gaze without seeing, and my versatile mind is engaged either in nothing or in repeating something over and over, such as, “But the sweet face of Lucy Gray will never more be seen.” Only I am not aware that I have been repeating it until I happen to remember it afterward.\n\nAlways the fudge is very good, and I eat and eat with unabated relish until all the little squares are gone. A very little of my fudge has been known to give some people a most terrific stomach-ache--but my own digestive organs seem to like nothing better. It’s so brown--so rich!\n\nI amuse myself with this for an hour or two in the afternoon. Then I go downstairs and work awhile.\n\nThere are few things that annoy me so much as to be called a young lady. I am no lady--as any one could see by close inspection, and the phrase has an odious sound. I would rather be called a sweet little thing, or a fallen woman, or a sensible girl--though they would each be equally a lie.\n\nAlways I am glad when night comes and I can sleep. My mind works busily repeating things while I divest myself of my various dusty garments. As I remove a dozen or two of hairpins from my head I say within me:\n\n“You are old, father William, one would hardly suppose That your eye is as steady as ever; Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose-- What made you so awfully clever?”\n\nAlways I take a little clock to bed with me and hang it by a cord at the head of my bed for company. I have named the clock Little Fido, because it is so constant and ticks always. It is beginning to stand in the same relation to me as J. T. Trowbridge’s magazine. If I were to go away from here I should take Little Fido and the magazine with me.\n\nEvery morning, being beautifully hungry after my walk, I eat three boiled eggs out of the shell for my breakfast. The while I mentally thank the kind Providence that invented hens. Also I eat bits of toast. I have my breakfast alone--because the rest of the family are still sleeping,--sitting at a corner of the kitchen table. I enjoy those three eggs and those bits of toast. Usually when I am eating my breakfast I am thinking of three things: the varying price of any eggs that are fit to eat; of what to do after I’ve finished my housework and before lunch; and of my one friend. And I meditatively and gently kick the leg of the table with the heel of my right foot.\n\nI have beautiful hair.\n\nIn the front of my shirt-waist there are nine cambric handkerchiefs cunningly distributed. My figure is very pretty, to be sure, but not so well developed as it will be in five years--if I live so long. And so I help it out materially with nine cambric handkerchiefs. You can see by my picture that my waist curves gracefully out. Only it is not all flesh--some of it is handkerchief. It amuses me to do this. It is one of my petty vanities.\n\nLikewise by an ingenious arrangement of my striped moreen petticoat I contrive to display a more evident pair of hips than Nature seems to have intended for me at this stage. Doubtless they also will take on fuller proportions when some years have passed. Still I am not dissatisfied with them as they are. It is not as if they were too well developed--in which case I should have need of all my skill in arranging my moreen petticoat so as to lessen their effect. It is easy enough to add on to these things, but one would experience serious difficulty in attempting to take from them. I hate that heavy, aggressive kind of hips. Moreover, small, graceful ones are desirable when one is nineteen. The world at large judges you more leniently on that account--usually. Narrow, shapely hips may give one an effect of youth and harmlessness which is a distinct advantage, when, for instance, one is writing a Portrayal and so will be at the world’s mercy. I believe I should not think of attempting to write a Portrayal if I had hips like a pair of saddle-bags. Certainly it would avail me nothing.\n\nSometimes I look at my face in a mirror and find it not plain but ugly. And there are other times when I look and find it not pretty but beautiful with a Madonna-like sweetness.\n\nI told you I might say more about the liver that is within me before I have done. Well, then, I will say this: that the world, if it had a liver like mine, would be very different from what it is. The world would be many-colored and mobile and passionate and nervous and high-strung and intensely alive and poetic and romantic and philosophical and egotistic and pathetic, and, oh, racked to the verge of madness with the spirit of unrest--if the world had a liver like mine. It is not all of these now. It is rather stupid. Gods and little fishes! would not the world be wonderful if all in it were like me? And it would be if it had a liver like mine. For it is my liver mostly that makes me what I am--apart from my genius. My liver is fine and perfect, but sensitive, and, well--it’s a dangerous thing to have within you.\n\nIt is the liver of the MacLanes.\n\nIt is the foundation of the curious castle of my existence.\n\nAnd after all, fine, brave, stupid world, you may be grateful to the Devil that yours is not like it.\n\nI have seventeen little engraved portraits of Napoleon that I keep in one of my bureau-drawers. Often late in the evening, between nine and ten o’clock, when I come in from a walk over the sand and barrenness, I take these pictures from the drawer and gaze at them carefully a long time and think of that man until I am stirred to the depths.\n\nAnd then easily and naturally I fall in love with Napoleon.\n\nIf only he were living now, I think to myself, I would make my way to him by whatever means and cast myself at his feet. I would entreat him with the most passionate humbleness of spirit to take me into his life for three days. To be the wife of Napoleon for three days--that would be enough for a lifetime! I would be much more than satisfied if I could get three such days out of life.\n\nI suppose a man is either a villain or a fool, though some of them seem to be a judicious mingling of both. The type of the distinct villain is preferable to a mixture of the two, and to a plain fool. I like a villain anyway--a villain that can be rather tender at times. And so, then, as I look at the pictures I fall in love with the incomparable Napoleon. The seventeen pictures are all different and all alike. I fall in love with each picture separately.\n\nIn one he is ugly and unattractive--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn another he is cruel and heartless and utterly selfish--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn a third he has a fat, pudgy look, and is quite insignificant--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn a fourth he is grandly sad and full of despair--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the fifth he is greasy and greedy and common-looking--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the sixth he is masterly and superior and exalted--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the seventh he is romantic and beautiful--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the eighth he is obviously sensual and reeking with uncleanness--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the ninth he is unearthly and mysterious and unreal--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the tenth he is black and sullen-browed, and ill-humored--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the eleventh he is inferior and trifling and inane--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the twelfth he is rough and ruffianly and uncouth--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the thirteenth he is little and wolfish and vile--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the fourteenth he is calm and confident and intellectual--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the fifteenth he is vacillating and fretful and his mouth is like a woman’s--and still he is strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the sixteenth he is slow and heavy and brutal--and strong. I fall in love with him.\n\nIn the seventeenth he is rather tender--and strong. I fall vividly in love with him.\n\nNapoleon was rather like the Devil, I think as I sit in the straight-backed chair with my feet on the bureau and gaze long and intently at the seventeen pictures, late in the evening.\n\nThen I wearily put them away, maddened with the sense of Nothingness, and take Little Fido and go to bed.\n\nSometimes, early in the evening just before dinner, I sit in the stiff-backed chair with my elbows on the window-sill and my head resting on one hand, and I look out of the window at a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime. These are in the vacant lot next to this house.\n\nI fix my eyes intently on the Pile of Stones and the Barrel of Lime. And I fix my thoughts on them also. And some of my widest thoughts come to me then.\n\nI feel an overwhelming wave of a kind of pantheism which, at the moment I feel it, begins slowly to grow less and less and continues in this until finally it dwindles to a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime.\n\nI feel at the moment that the universe is a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime. They alone are the Real Things.\n\nTake anything at any point and deceive yourself into thinking that you are happy with it. But look at it heavily; dig down underneath the layers and layers of rose-colored mists and you will find that your Thing is a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime.\n\nA struggle or two, a fight, an agony, a passing--and then the only Real Things: a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime.\n\nDamn everything! Afterward you will find that you have done all your damning for naught. For there is nothing worthy of damnation except a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime--and they are not damnable. They have never harmed you, and moreover they alone are the Real Things.\n\nJulius Caesar made many wars. Sir Francis Drake went sailing over the seas. It was all child’s play and counts for nothing. Here are the Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime.\n\nAnd so this is how it is early in the evening just before dinner, when I sit in the uncomfortable chair with my elbows on the window-sill and my head resting on one hand.\n\nI have two pictures of Marie Bashkirtseff high upon my wall. Often I lean my head on the back of the chair with my feet on the bureau--always with my feet on the bureau--and look at these pictures.\n\nIn one of them she is eighteen years old and wears a green frock which is extremely becoming--of which fact the person inside of it seems fully aware. The other picture is taken from her last photograph, when she was twenty-four.\n\nMarie Bashkirtseff is a very beautiful creature. And evidently she is not obliged to arrange a moreen petticoat over her plumpness. She has a wonderfully voluptuous look for a woman of eighteen years. In the later picture vanity is written in every line of her graceful form and in every feature of that charming face. The picture fairly yells: “I am Marie Bashkirtseff--and, oh, I am splendid!”\n\nAnd as I look at the pictures I am glad. For though she was admirable and splendid, and all, she was no such genius as I. She had a genius of her own, it is true. But the Bashkirtseff, with her voluptuous body and her attractive personality, is after all a bit ordinary. My genius, though not powerful, is rare and deep, and no one has ever had or ever will have a genius like it.\n\nMary MacLane, if you live--if you live, my darling, the world will one day recognize your genius. And when once the world has recognized such genius as this--oh, then no one will ever think of profaning it by comparing it with any Bashkirtseff!\n\nBut I would give up this genius eagerly, gladly--at once and forever--for one dear, bright day free from loneliness.\n\nThe portraits of the Bashkirtseff are certainly beautiful, but there is something about them that is--well, not common, but bourgeois at least, as if she were a German waitress of unusual appearance, or an aristocratic shop-girl, or a nurse with good taste who would walk out on pleasant forenoons wheeling a go-cart--something of that sort. Perhaps it is because her neck is too short, or because her wrists are too muscular-looking. I thank a gracious Devil as I look up at the pictures that I have not those particular points and that particular bourgeois air. I am bound to confess that I have one of my own, but mine is Highland Scotch--and anyway, I am Mary MacLane.\n\nMarie Bashkirtseff is beautiful enough, however, that she can easily afford to look rather second-rate.\n\nI like to look at my two pictures of her.\n\nI value money literally for its own sake. I like the feeling of dollars and quarters rubbing softly together in my hand. Always it reminds me of those lovely chestfuls of gold that Captain Kidd buried--no one seems to know just where. Usually I keep some fairly-clean dollars and quarters to handle. “Money is so nice!” I say to myself.\n\nIf you think, fine world, that I am always interesting and striking and admirable, always original, showing up to good advantage in a company of persons, and all--why, then you are beautifully mistaken. There are times, to be sure, when I can rivet the attention of the crowd heavily upon myself. But mostly I am the very least among all the idiots and fools. I show up to the poorest possible advantage.\n\nOf several ways that are mine there is one that gives me a distinct and hopeless air of insignificance. I have seen people, having met me for the first time, glance carelessly at me as if they were quite sure I had not an idea in my brain--if I had a brain; as if they wondered why I had been asked there; as if they were fully aware that they had but to fiddle and “It” would dance. Sometimes before this highly intellectual gathering breaks up I manage to make them change their minds with astonishing suddenness. But nearly always I don’t bother about it at all. I go among people occasionally because it amuses me. It may be a literary club where they talk theosophy, or it may be a Cornish dance where they have pasty and saffron cake and the chief amusement is sending beer-bottles at various heads, or it may be a lady-like circle of married women with cerise silk drop-skirts and white kid gloves, drinking chocolate in the afternoon and talking about something “shocking!”\n\nAnd often, as I say, I am the least of them.\n\nGenius is an odd thing.\n\nWhen certain of my skirts need sewing, they don’t get sewed. I simply pin the rents in them together and it lasts as long or longer than if I had seated myself in my stiff-backed chair with a needle and thread and mended them--like a sensible girl. (I hate a sensible girl.)\n\nThough I have never yet hurriedly pinned up a torn flounce or several inches of skirt-binding without saying softly to myself, using a trite, expressive phrase, “Certainly, it’s a hell of a way to do.” Still I never take a needle and mend my garments. I couldn’t, anyway. I never learned to sew, and I don’t intend ever to learn. It reminds me too much of a constipated dressmaker.\n\nAnd so I pin up the torn places--though, as I say, I never fail to make use of the quaint, expressive phrase.\n\nAll of which a reasonably astute reader will recognize as an important point in the portraying of any character--whether mine or the queen of Spain’s.\n\nI had for my dinner to-day some whole-wheat bread, some liver-and-bacon, and some green, green early asparagus. While I was eating these the world seemed a very nice place indeed.\n\nI never see people walking along on the opposite side of the street, as I sit by my window, without wondering who they are, and how they live, and how ugly they would look if their bodies were not adorned with clothes. Always I feel certain that some of them are bow-legged.\n\nAnd sometimes I see a woman in a fearful state of deshabille walk across the vacant lot next to this. “A plague on me,” I say then to myself, “if I ever become middle-aged and if my entire being seems to tip up in the front, and if I go about with no stays so that when I tie an apron around my waist my upper fatness hangs over the band like a natural blouse.”\n\nAnd so--I could go on writing all night these seemingly trivial but really significant details relating to the outer genius. But these will answer. These to any one who knows things will be a revelation.\n\nSometimes you know things, fine brave world.\n\nYou must know likewise that though I do ordinary things, when I do them they cease to be ordinary. I make fudge--and a sweet girl makes fudge, but there are ways and ways of doing things. This entire affair of the fudge is one of my uniquest points.\n\nNo sweet girl makes fudge and eats it, as I make fudge and eat it.\n\nSo it is.\n\nBut, oh--who is to understand all this? Who will understand any of this Portrayal? My unhappy soul has delved in shadows far, far beyond and below."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "23 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "My philosophy, I find after very little analysis, approaches precariously near to sensualism.\n\nIt is wonderful how many sides there can be to just one character.\n\nNature, with all those suns, and all those hilltops, and all those rivers, and all those stars, is inscrutable--intangible--maddening. It affects one with unutterable joy and anguish, but no one can ever begin to understand what it means.\n\nHuman nature is yet more inscrutable--and nothing appears on the surface. One can have no idea of the things buried in the minds of one’s acquaintances. And mostly they are fools and have no idea themselves of what germs are in themselves--of what they are capable. And in most minds it is true the dormant devils never awaken and never are known.\n\nIt is another sign of my analytical genius, that I, aged nineteen, recognize the devils in my character. I have not the slightest wish, since things are as they are with me, to rid myself of them. There is in me much more of evil than of good. Genius like mine must needs have with it manifold bad. “I have in me the germ of every crime.” I have no desire to destroy these germs. I should be glad indeed to have them develop into a ravaging disease. Something in this dreadful confusion would then give way. My wooden heart and my soul would cry out in the darkness less heavily, less bitterly.\n\nThey want something--they know not what.\n\nI give them poison.\n\nThey snatch it and eat it hungrily.\n\nThen they are not so hungry. They become quieter.\n\nThe ravaging disease soothes them to sleep--it descends on them like rain in the autumn.\n\nWhen I hurry over my sand and barrenness my vivid passions come to me--or when I sit and look at the horizon. When I walk slowly I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings, to poison thoroughly this soul of unrest and this wooden heart so that they would never more be conscious of too-brilliant lights, and to make myself over into a quite different creature.\n\nA little evil would do--a little of a fine, good quality.\n\nI should like a man to come (it is always a man, have you ever noticed?--whatever one contemplates when one is of womankind and young). I should like a man to come, I said calmly to myself to-day as I walked slowly over my barrenness--a perfect villain to come and fascinate me and lead me with strong, gentle allurements to what would be technically termed my ruin. And as the world views such things it would be my ruin. But as I view such things it would not be ruin. It would be a new lease on life.\n\nYes, I should like a man to come--any man so that he is strong and thoroughly a villain, and so that he fascinates me. Particularly he must fascinate me. There must be no falling in love about it. I doubt if I could fascinate him, but I should ask him quite humbly to lead me to my ruin.\n\nI have never yet seen the man who would not readily respond to such an appeal.\n\nThis villain would be no exception.\n\nI would then jerk my life out of this Nothingness by the roots. Farewell, a long farewell, I would say. Then I would go forth with the man to my ruin. The man would be bad to his heart’s core. And after living but a short time with him my shy, sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and polluted. The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life. And so everything within me that had turned toward that too-bright light would then drink deep of the lees of death.\n\nThe thirst of this incessant unrest and longing, this weariness of self, would be quenched completely.\n\nMy life would be like fertile soil planted thickly with rank wild mustard. On every square inch of soil there would be a dozen sprouts of wild mustard. There would be no room--no room at all--for an anemone to grow. If one should start up, instantly it would be choked and overrun with wild mustard. But no anemone would start up.\n\nMy life now is a life of pain and revolt.\n\nMy life darkened and partly killed would be more than content to drift along with the current.\n\nOh, it would be a rest!\n\nThe Christians sing, there is rest for the weary, on the other side of Jordan, where the tree of life is blooming. But that rest, of course, is for the Christians. My rest will have to come on this side of Jordan. Let the impress of a thoroughly evil and strong man be stamped upon my inner life, and I am convinced there would come a wonderful settled quiet over it. Its spirit would be broken. It would rest. Why not? I have no virtue-sense. Nothing to me is of any consequence except to be rid of this unrest and pain. Yes, surely I might rest.\n\nThe coming of the man-devil would bring rest. But I am fool enough to think that marriage--the real marriage--is possible for me!\n\nThis other thing is within the reach of every one--of fools and geniuses alike--and of all that come between.\n\nAnd so I want a fascinating wicked man to come and make me positively, rather than negatively, wicked. I feel a terrific wave of utter weariness. My life lies fallow. I am tired of sitting here. The sand and barrenness is gray with age. And I am gray with age.\n\nHappiness--the red of the sunset sky--is the intensest desire of my life.\n\nBut I will grasp eagerly anything else that is offered me--anything.\n\nThe poisoning of my soul--the passing of my unrest--would rouse my mental power. My genius would receive a wonderful impetus from it. You would marvel, good world, at the things I should write. Not that they would be exalted--not that they would surge upward. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? But they would be marvels of fire and intensity. I should no longer exhaust much of my energy in grinding, grinding within. The things that would come of the thorns and thistles would excite your astonishment and admiration, though they be not grapes and figs.\n\nAnd as for me--the real me--the creature imbued with a spirit of intense femininity, with a spirit of an intense sense of Love--with a spirit like that of the Magdalene who loved too much, with the very soul of unrest and Nothingness--this thing would vanish swiftly into oblivion, and I should go down a dark world and feel not."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "25 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "One of the remarkable points about my life is that it is so completely, hopelessly alone--a lonely, lonely life. This book of mine contains but one character--myself.\n\nThere is also the Devil--as a possibility.\n\nAnd there is also the anemone lady--my dearest beloved--as a memory.\n\nI have read books that were written to portray but one character, and there were various people brought in to help in the portraying. But my one friend is gone, and there is no person who enters into my inner life in the very least. I am always alone. I might mingle with people intimately every hour of my life--still I should be alone.\n\nAlways alone--alone.\n\nNot even a God to worship.\n\nHow do I bear this? How do I get through the days and days?\n\nAnd, oh, when it all comes over me, what frightful rage--what long agony of my breaking heart--what utter woe!\n\nWhen the stars shine down upon me with cold hatred; when miles and miles of barrenness stretch out around me and envelop me in their weary, weary Nothingness; when the wind blows over me like the breath of a vicious giant; when the ugly, ugly sun radiates centuries of hard, heavy bitterness around me from its stinging rays; when the sky maddens me with its cold, careless blue; when the rivers that are flowing over the earth send echoes to me of their hateful voices; when I hear wild geese honking in bitter wailing melody; when bristling edges of jagged rocks cut sharply into my tired life; when drops of rain fall on me and pierce me like steel points; when the voices in the air shriek little-minded malice in my ears; when the green of Nature is the green of spitefulness and cruelty; when the red, red of the setting sun burns and consumes me with its horrid feverish effervescence; when I feel the all-hatred of the Universe for its poor little earth-bugs: then it is that I approach nearest to Rest.\n\nThe softnesses are my Unrest.\n\nI do not want those bitter things.\n\nBut I must have them if I would rest.\n\nI want the softnesses and I want Rest!\n\nOh, dear faint soul, it is hard--hard for us.\n\nWe are sick with loneliness."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "26 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Now and again I have torturing glimpses of a Paradise. And I feel my soul in its pain every moment of my life. Otherwise, how gladly would I deny the existence of a soul and a life to come!\n\nFor my soul is beset with Nothingness, and the Paradise that shows itself is not for me."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "28 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Hatred, after all, is the easiest thing of all to bear.\n\nIf you have been forgotten by the one who must have made you, and if you have been left alone of human beings all your life--all your nineteen years--then, when at last you see some one looking toward you with beautiful eyes, and extending to you a beautiful hand, and showing you a beautiful heart wherein is just a little of beautiful sympathy for you--for you--oh, that is harder than anything to bear. Harder than the loneliness and the bitterness--and the tears are nearer and nearer.\n\nBut one would be hurt often, often for the sake of the beautiful things. Yes, one would gladly be hurt long and often.\n\nI shall never forget how it was with me when I first saw the beautiful eyes of my dearest anemone lady when they were looking gently--at me--and the beautiful hand, and the beautiful heart.\n\nThe awakening of my racked soul is hardly more heavily laden with passion and pain. I shall never forget.\n\nThough I feel away from her also, she is the only one out of all to look gently at me.\n\nLet me writhe and falter with pain; let me go mad--but oh, worldful of people--for the love of your God--give me out of this seething darkness only one beautiful human hand to touch mine with love, one beautiful human heart to know the aching sad loneliness of mine, one beautiful, human soul to mingle with mine in long, long Rest.\n\nOh, for a human being, my soul wails--a human being to love me!\n\nOh, to know--just once--what it is to be loved!\n\nNineteen years without one faint shadow of love is mouldy, crumbling age--is gray with the dust of centuries.\n\nHow long have I lived?\n\nHow long must I live?\n\nI am shrieking at you, cold, stupid world.\n\nOh, the long, long waiting!\n\nThe millions of human beings!\n\nI am a human being and there is no one--no one--no one.\n\nWho can know this that has not felt it? You do not know--you can not know.\n\nSurely I do not ask too much. But whether or not it is too much I can not go through the years without it--oh, I can not!\n\nYou have lived your nineteen years, fine world, and you have lived through some after years.\n\nBut in your nineteen years there was some one to love you.\n\nIt is that that counts.\n\nSince you have had that some one, in your nineteen years, can you understand what life is to me--me--in my loneliness?\n\nMy wailing, waiting soul burns with but one desire: to be loved--oh, to be loved."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "29 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I am making the world my confessor in this Portrayal. My mind is fairly bursting with egotism and pain, and in writing this I find a merciful outlet. I have become fond of my Portrayal. Often I lay my forehead and my lips caressingly upon the pages.\n\nAnd I wish to let you know that there is in existence a genius--an unhappy genius, a genius starving in Montana in the barrenness--but still a genius. I am a creature the like of which you have never before happened upon. You have never suspected that there is such a person. I know that there is not such another. As I said in the beginning, the world contains not my parallel.\n\nI am a fantasy--an absurdity--a genius!\n\nHad I been one of the beasts that perish I had been likewise a fantasy. I think I should have been a small animal composite of a pig, a leopard, and a skunk: an animal that I fancy would be uncanny to look upon but admirable for a pet.\n\nHowever, I am not one of the beasts that perish.\n\nI am human.\n\nThat is another remarkable point.\n\nI have heard persons say they can hardly believe I am quite human.\n\nI am the most human creature that ever was placed on the earth. The geniuses are always more human than the herd. Almost a perfection of humanness is reached in me. This by itself makes me extraordinary. The rarest thing in the world, I find, is the quality of humanness.\n\nHumanity and humaneness are much less rare.\n\n“It is a brave thing to understand something of what we see.” Indeed it is. An exceeding brave thing. The one who said that had surely gone out on the highways and byways and found how little he could understand.\n\nTo understand oneself is not so brave a thing. To go in among the hidden gray shadows of the deep things is a fool’s errand. It is not from choice that I do it. No one carries a mill-stone around her neck from choice. When I see what is among the hidden gray shadows--when I see a vision of Myself--I am seized with a strange, sick terror.\n\nA fool’s errand--but one that I must need go--and for that matter I myself am a fool.\n\nYet to know oneself well is a rare fine art.\n\nI analyze myself now. I analyzed myself when I was three years old.\n\nThe only difference is that at the age of three I was not aware that I analyzed. It is true, that is a great difference. Now I know that I am analyzing at nineteen, and now I know that I analyzed at three.\n\nAnd at the age of nineteen I know that I am a genius.\n\nA genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius. A drunken man might stagger up to a piano and accidentally play music that vibrates to the soul--that touches upon the mysteries. But he does not know his power, and he is no genius, though men awaken and go mad therefrom.\n\nI know that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived.\n\nI have a feeling that the world will never know this.\n\nAnd as I think of it I wonder if angels are not weeping somewhere because of it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "31 March 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "“She only said: ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’”\n\nAll day long this heart-sickening song of Mariana has been reeling and swimming in my brain. I awoke with it early in the morning, and it is still with me now in the lateness. I wondered at times during the day why that very gentle and devilishly persistent refrain did not drive me insane or send me into convulsions. I tried vainly to fix my mind on a book. I began reading “Mill on the Floss,” but that weird poem was not to be foiled. It bewitched my brain. Now, as I write, I hear twenty voices chanting in a sad minor key--twenty voices that fill my brain with sound to the bursting point. “He cometh not--he cometh not--he cometh not.” “That I were dead”--“I am aweary, aweary,--that I were dead--that I were dead.” “He cometh not--that I were dead.”\n\nIt is maddening in that it is set sublimely to the music of my own life.\n\nNow that I have written it I can hope that it may leave me. If it follows me through the night, and if I awake to another day of it the cords of my overworked mind will surely break.\n\nBut let me thank the kind Devil.\n\nIt is leaving me now!\n\nIt is as if tons were lifted from my brain."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "2 April 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "How can any one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round with a certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!\n\nThere are persons whose souls have never entered into them.\n\nMy mother has some fondness for me--for my body because it came of hers. That is nothing--nothing.\n\nA hen loves its egg.\n\nA hen!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "3 April 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "This evening in the slow-deepening dusk I sat by my window and spent an hour in passionate conversation with the Devil. I fancied I sat, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, on an ugly but comfortable red velvet sofa in some nondescript room.\n\nAnd the fascinating man-devil was seated near in a frail willow chair.\n\nHe had willingly come to pass the time of day with me. He was in a good-humored mood, and I amused and interested him. And for myself, I was extremely glad to see the Devil sitting there and felt vividly as always. But I sat quietly enough.\n\nThe fascinating man-devil has fascinating steel-gray eyes, and they looked at me with every variety of glance--from quizzical to tender.\n\nIt were easy--oh, how easy--to follow those eyes to the earth’s ends.\n\nThe Devil leaned back in the frail willow chair and looked at me.\n\n“And now that I am here, Mary MacLane,” he said, “what would you?”\n\n“I want you to marry me,” I replied at once. “And I want it more than ever anything was wanted since the world began.”\n\n“So? I am flattered,” said the Devil, and smiled gently, enchantingly.\n\nAt that smile I was ravished and transported, and a spasm of some rare emotion thrilled all the little nerves in me from my heels to my forehead. And yet the smile was not for me but rather somewhat at my expense.\n\n“But,” he went on, “you must know it is not my custom to marry women.”\n\n“I am sure it is not,” I agreed, “and I do not ask to be peculiarly favored. Anything that you may give me, however little, will constitute marriage for me.”\n\n“And would marriage itself be so small a thing?” asked the Devil.\n\n“Marriage,” I said, “would be a great, oh, a wonderful thing, and the most beautiful of all. I want what is good according to my lights, and because I am a genius my lights are many and far-reaching.”\n\n“What do your lights tell you?” the man-devil inquired.\n\n“They tell me this: that nothing in the world matters unless love is with it, and if love is with it and it seems to the virtuous a barren and infamous thing, still--because of the love--it partakes of the very highest.”\n\n“And have you the courage of your convictions?” he said.\n\n“If you offered me,” I replied, “that which to the blindly virtuous seems the worst possible thing, it would yet be for me the red, red line on the sky, my heart’s desire, my life, my rest. You are the Devil. I have fallen in love with you.”\n\n“I believe you have,” said the Devil. “And how does it feel to be in love?”\n\nSitting composedly on the ugly red velvet sofa, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, I attempted to define that wonderful feeling.\n\n“It feels,” I said, “as if sparks of fire and ice crystals ran riot in my veins with my blood; as if a thousand pin-points pierced my flesh, and every other point a point of pleasure, and every other point a point of pain; as if my heart were laid to rest in a bed of velvet and cotton-wool but kept awake by sweet violin arias; as if milk and honey and the blossoms of the cherry flowed into my stomach and then vanished utterly; as if strange, beautiful worlds lay spread out before my eyes, alternately in dazzling light and complete darkness with chaotic rapidity; as if orris-root were sprinkled in the folds of my brain; as if sprigs of dripping-wet sweet-fern were stuck inside my hot linen collar; as if--well, you know,” I ended suddenly.\n\n“Very good,” said the Devil. “You are in love. And you say you are in love with me.”\n\n“Oh, with you!” I exclaimed with suppressed violence. The effort to suppress this violence cost me pounds of nerve-power. But I kept my hands still quietly folded and my feet crossed, and it was a triumph of self-control. “I want you to marry me,” I added despairingly.\n\n“And you think,” he inquired, “that apart from the opinion of the wise world, it would be a suitable marriage?”\n\n“A suitable marriage!” I exclaimed. “I hate a suitable marriage! No, it would not be suitable. It would be Bohemian, outlandish, adorable!”\n\nThe Devil smiled.\n\nThis time the smile was for me. And, oh, the long, old, overpowering enchantment of the smile of steel-gray eyes!--the steel-gray eyes of the Devil!\n\nIt is one of those things that one remembers.\n\n“You are a beautifully frank, little feminine creature,” he said. “Frankness is in these days a lost art.”\n\n“Yes, I am beautifully frank,” I replied. “Out of countless millions of the Devil’s anointed I am one to acknowledge myself.”\n\n“But withal you are not true,” said the man-devil.\n\n“I am a liar,” I answered.\n\n“You are a liar, surely,” he said, “but you stay with your lies. To stay with anything is Truth.”\n\n“It is so,” I replied. “Nevertheless I am false as woman can be.”\n\n“But you know what you want.”\n\n“Oh, yes,” I said, “I know what I want. I want you to marry me.”\n\n“And why?”\n\n“Because I love you.”\n\n“That seems an excellent reason, certainly,” said the Devil.\n\n“I want to be happy for once in my life,” I said. “I have never been happy. And if I could be happy once for one gold day, I should be satisfied, and I should have that to remember in the long years.”\n\n“And you are a strangely pathetic little animal,” said the Devil.\n\n“I am pathetic,” I said. I clasped my hands very tightly. “I know that I am pathetic: and for this reason I am the most terribly pathetic of all in the world.”\n\n“Poor little Mary MacLane!” said the Devil. He leaned toward me. He looked at me with those strange, wonderfully tender, divine steel-gray eyes. “Poor little Mary MacLane!” he said again in a voice that was like the Gray Dawn. And the eyes--the glance of the steel-gray eyes entered into me and thrilled me through and through. It frightened and soothed me. It racked and comforted me. It ravished me with inconceivable gentleness so that I bent my head down and sobbed as I breathed.\n\n“Don’t you know, you little thing,” said the man-devil, softly-compassionate, “your life will be very hard for you always--harder when you are happy than when you go in Nothingness?”\n\n“I know--I know. Nevertheless I want to be happy,” I sobbed. I felt a rush of an old thick, heavy anguish. “It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and all alone. Always I have been alone: when I was five and lay in the damp grass and tortured myself to keep back tears; and through the long, cold, lonely years till now--and now all the torture does not keep back the tears. There is no one--nothing--to help me bear it. It is more than pathetic when one is nineteen in all young, new feeling and sees Nothing anywhere--except long, dark, lonely years behind her and before her. No one that loves me and long, long years.”\n\nI stopped. The gray eyes were fixed on me. Oh, they were the steel-gray eyes!--and they had a look in them. The long, bitter pageant of my Nothingness mingled with this look and the coming together of these was like the joining of two halves.\n\nI do not know which brings me the deeper pain--the loneliness and weariness of my sand and barrenness, or the look in the steel-gray eyes. But as always I would gladly leave all and follow the eyes to the world’s end. They are like the sun’s setting. And they are like the pale, beautiful stars. And they are like the shadows of earth and sky that come together in the dark.\n\n“Why,” asked the Devil, “are you in love with me?”\n\n“You know so much--so much,” I answered. “I think it must be that. The wisdom of the spheres is in your brain. And so, then, you must understand me. Because no one understands all these smouldering feelings my greatest agony is. You must need know the very finest of them. And your eyes! Oh, it’s no matter why I’m in love with you. It’s enough that I am. And if you married me I would make you happier than you are.”\n\n“I am not happy at all,” said the man-devil. “I am merely contented.”\n\n“Contentment,” I said, “in place of Happiness, is a horrid feeling. Not one of your countless advocates loves you. They all serve you faithfully and well, but with it all they hate you. Always people hate their tyrant. You are my tyrant, but I love you absorbingly, madly. Happiness for me would be to live with you and see you made happy by the overwhelming flood of my love.”\n\n“It interests me,” he said. “You are a most interesting feminine philosopher--and your philosophy is after my own heart, in its lack of virtue. It is to be hoped you are not ‘intellectual,’ which is an unpardonable trait.”\n\n“Indeed, I am not,” I replied. “Intellectual people are detestable. They have pale faces and bad stomachs and bad livers, and if they are women their corsets are sure to be too tight, and probably black, and if they are men they are soft, which is worse. And they never by any chance know what it means to walk all day in the rain, or to roll around on the ground in the dirt. And, above all, they never fall in love with the Devil.”\n\n“They are tiresome,” the Devil agreed. “If I were to marry you how long would you be happy?”\n\n“For three days.”\n\n“You are wise,” he said. “You are wonderfully wise in some things, though you are still very young.”\n\n“I am wise,” I answered. “Being of womankind and nineteen years, I am more than ready to give up absolutely everything that is good in the world’s sight, though they are contemptible things enough in my own, for love. All for love. Therefore I am wise. Also I am a fool.”\n\n“Why are you a fool?”\n\n“Because I am a genius.”\n\n“Your logic is good logic,” said the Devil.\n\n“My logic--oh, I don’t care anything about logic,” I said with sudden complete weariness. I felt buried and wrapped round and round in weariness. Everything lost its color. Everything turned cold.\n\n“At this moment,” said the Devil, “you feel as if you cared for nothing at all. But if I chose I could bring about a transfiguration. I could kiss your soul into Paradise.”\n\nI answered, “Yes,” without emotion.\n\n“An hour,” said the Devil, “is not very long. But we know it is long enough to suffer in, and go mad in, and live in, and be happy in. And the world contains a great many hours. Now I am leaving you. It is likely that I may never come again, and it is likely that I may come again.”\n\nIt all vanished. I still sat by my window in the gloom. “It is dreary,” I said.\n\nBut yes. The world contains a great many hours."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "4 April 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I have asked for bread, sometimes, and I have been given a stone.\n\nOh, it is a bitter thing--oh, it is piteous, piteous!\n\nI find that I am not far apart from human beings. I can still be crushed, wounded, stunned, by the attitude of human beings.\n\nTo-day I looked for human-kindness, and I was given coldness. I repelled human beings.\n\nI asked for bread and I was given a stone.\n\nOh, it is bitter--bitter.\n\nOh, is there a thing in the wide world more bitter?\n\nGod, where are you! I am crushed, wounded, stunned--and, oh--I am alone!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "10 April 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I have a sense of humor that partakes of the divine in life--for there are things even in this chaotic irony that are divine. My genius is not divine. My patheticness is not divine. My philosophy is not divine, nor my originality, nor my audacity of thought. These are peculiarly of the earth. But my sense of humor--\n\nIt is humor that is far too deep to admit of laughter. It is humor that makes my heart melt with a high, unequaled sense of pleasure and ripple down through my body like old yellow wine.\n\nA rare tone in a person’s voice, a densely wrathful expression in a pair of slate-colored eyes, a fine, fine shade of comparison and contrast between a word in a conversation and an angleworm pattern in a calico dressing-jacket--these are things that make me conscious of divine emotion.\n\nOne day last summer an Italian peddler-woman stopped at the back door and rested herself. I stood in the doorway, and the peddler-woman and I talked. She had a dirty white handkerchief tied over her head--as all Italian peddler-women do--and she had a telescope valise filled with garters, and hairpins, and soap, and combs, and pencils, and china buttons on blue cards, and bean-shooters, and tacks, and dream-books, and mouth-organs, and green glass beads, and jews-harps. There is something fascinating about a peddler-woman’s telescope valise. This peddler-woman wore a black satine wrapper and an ancient cape. She said that she would like to stop and rest a while, and I told her she might. I had always wanted to talk to a peddler-woman, and my mother never would allow one in the house.\n\n“Is it nice to be a peddler?” I asked her.\n\n“It ain’t bad,” replied the peddler-woman.\n\n“Do you make a great deal of money?” I next inquired.\n\n“Sometime I do, and sometime I don’t,” said the woman. She spoke with an accent that, while it sounded Italian, still showed unmistakably that she had lived in Butte.\n\n“Well, do you make just enough to live on, or have you saved some money?” I asked.\n\n“I got four hundred dollar in the bank,” she replied. “I been peddlin’ eight year.”\n\n“Eight years of tramping around in all kinds of weather,” I said. “Your philosophy must be peripatetic, too. Haven’t you ever had rheumatism in your knees?”\n\n“I got rheumatism in every joint in my body,” said the woman. “I have to lay off, sometime.”\n\n“Have you a husband?” I wished to know.\n\n“I had a man--oh, yes,” said the peddler-woman.\n\n“And where is he?”\n\n“Back home--in Italy.”\n\n“Why doesn’t he come out here and work for you?” I asked.\n\n“Yes, w’y don’t he?” said the woman. “Dat-a man, he’s dem lucky w’en he can get enough to eat--he is.”\n\n“Why don’t you send him some money to pay his way out, since you’ve saved so much?” I inquired.\n\n“Holy God!” said the peddler-woman. “I work hard for dat-a money. I save ev’ry cent. I ain’t go’n now to t’row it away--I ain’t. Dat-a man, he’s all right w’ere he is--he is.”\n\n“What did you marry him for?” I asked.\n\nThe peddler-woman looked at me with that look which seems to convey the information that curiosity once killed a cat.\n\n“What for?” I persisted--“for love?”\n\n“I marry him w’en I was young girl. And he was young, too.”\n\n“Yes--but what did you do it for? Was he awfully nice, and did he say awfully sweet things to you?”\n\n“He was dem sweet--oh, yes,” said the peddler-woman. She grinned. “And I was young.”\n\n“And you liked it when you were young and he was sweet, didn’t you?”\n\n“Yes, I guess so. I was young,” she answered.\n\nThe fact that one is young seems to imply--in the Italian peddler mind--a lacking in some essential points.\n\n“And don’t you like your man now?” I asked.\n\n“Dat-a man, he’s all right, in Italy--he is,” replied the woman.\n\n“Well,” I observed, “if I had a man who had been dem sweet once, when I had been young, but who was not sweet any more, I think I should leave him in Italy, too.”\n\n“You’ll git a man some day soon,” said the peddler-woman.\n\nI was interested to know that.\n\n“They all do--oh, yes,” she said. “But you likely to be better off peddlin’, I tell you.”\n\n“Yes, I think it would be amusing to be a peddler for a while,” I said. “But I should want the man, too, as long as he was dem sweet.”\n\nThe peddler-woman picked up the telescope valise.\n\n“Yes,” she remarked, “a man, he’s sweet two days, t’ree days, then--holy God! he never work, he git-a drunk, he make-a rough-house, he raise hell.”\n\nThe peddler-woman nodded at me and limped out of the yard. The telescope valise was heavy. When she walked every muscle in her body seemed to be pressed into the service. She had a heavy, solid look. She seemed as though she might weigh three hundred pounds, though she was not large. The afternoon sun shone down brightly on her dirty white handkerchief, on her brown comely face, on her brown brass-ringed hands, on her black satine wrapper, on her ancient cape.\n\nAs I watched her out of sight I thought to myself: “Two days, t’ree days, then--holy God! he never work, he git-a drunk, he make-a rough-house, he raise hell.”\n\nI was conscious of an intense humor that was so far beyond laughter that it was too deep even for tears. But I felt tears vaguely as I watched the peddler-woman limping up the road.\n\nIt was not pathos. It was humor--humor. My emotion was one of vivid pleasure--pleasure at the sight of the woman, and at the telescope valise, and at her conversation supplemented by my own.\n\nThis emotion is divine, and I can not grasp it.\n\nAs I looked after the Italian peddler-woman it came to me with sudden force that the earth is only the earth, but that it is touched here and there brilliantly with divine fingers.\n\nLong and often as I’ve sat in intense silent passion and gazed at the red, red sunset sky, I have never then felt this sense of the divine.\n\nIt comes only through humor.\n\nIt comes only with things like an Italian peddler-woman in a black satine wrapper and an ancient cape.\n\nMy soul--how heavily it goes.\n\nLife is a journeying up a spring-time hill. And at the top we wonder why we are there. Have mercy on me, I implore in a dull idea that the journey is so long--so long, and a human being is less than an atom.\n\nThe solid, heavy figure of an Italian peddler-woman with a telescope valise, limping away in the afternoon sunshine, is more convincing of the Things that Are than would be the sound of the wailing of legions of lost souls, could it be heard.\n\nFor the world must be amused.\n\nAnd the world’s wind listeth as it bloweth."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "11 April 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I write a great many letters to the dear anemone lady. I send some of them to her and others I keep to read myself. I like to read letters that I have written--particularly that I have written to her.\n\nThis is a letter that I wrote two days ago to my one friend:\n\n“To you:--\n\n“And don’t you know, my dearest, my friendship with you contains other things? It contains infatuation, and worship, and bewitchment, and idolatry, and a tiny altar in my soul-chamber whereon is burning sweet incense in a little dish of blue and gold.\n\n“Yes, all of these.\n\n“My life is made up of many outpourings. All the outpourings have one point of coming-together. You are the point of coming-together. There is no other.\n\n“You are the anemone lady.\n\n“You are the one whom I may love.\n\n“To think that the world contains one beautiful human being for me to love!\n\n“It is wonderful.\n\n“My life is longing for the sight of you. My senses are aching for lack of an anemone to diffuse itself among them.\n\n“A year ago, when you were in the high school, often I used to go over there when you would be going home, so that my life could be made momentarily replete by the sight of you. You didn’t know I was there--only a few times when I spoke to you.\n\n“And now it is that I remember you.\n\n“Oh, my dearest--you are the only one in the world!\n\n“We are two women. You do not love me, but I love you.\n\n“You have been wonderfully, beautifully kind to me.\n\n“You are the only one who has ever been kind to me.\n\n“There is something delirious in this--something of the nameless quantity.\n\n“It is old grief and woe to live nineteen years and to remember no person ever to have been kind. But what is it--do you think?--at the end of nineteen years, to come at last upon one who is wonderfully, beautifully kind!\n\n“Those persons who have had some one always to be kind to them can never remotely imagine how this feels.\n\n“Sometimes in these spring days when I walk miles down into the country to the little wet gulch of the sweet-flags, I wonder why it is that this thing does not make me happy. ‘She is wonderfully, beautifully kind,’ I say to myself--‘and she is the anemone lady. She is wondrously kind, and though she’s gone, nothing can ever change that.’\n\n“But I am not happy.\n\n“Oh, my one friend--what is the matter with me? What is this feeling? Why am I not happy?\n\n“But how can you know?\n\n“You are beautiful.\n\n“I am a small, vile creature.\n\n“Always I awake to this fact when I think of the anemone lady.\n\n“I am not good.\n\n“But you are kind to me--you are kind to me--you are kind to me.\n\n“You have written me two letters.\n\n“The anemone lady came down from her high places and wrote me two letters.\n\n“It is said that God is somewhere. It may be so.\n\n“But God has never come down from his high places to write me two letters.\n\n“Dear--do you see?--you are the only one in the world.\n\n“Mary MacLane.”"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "12 April 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "Oh, the dreariness, the Nothingness!\n\nDay after day--week after week,--it is dull and gray and weary. It is dull, DULL, DULL!\n\nNo one loves me the least in the world.\n\n“My life is dreary--he cometh not.”\n\nI am unhappy--unhappy.\n\nIt rains. The blue sky is weeping. But it is not weeping because I am unhappy.\n\nI hate the blue sky, and the rain, and the wet ground, and everything. This morning I walked far away over the sand, and these things made me think they loved me--and that I loved them. But they fooled me. Everything fools me. I am a fool.\n\nNo one loves me. There are people here. But no one loves me--no one understands--no one cares.\n\nIt is I and the barrenness. It is I--young and all alone.\n\nPitiful Heaven!--but no, Heaven is not pitiful.\n\nHeaven also has fooled me, more than once.\n\nThere is something for every one that I have ever known--some tender thing. But what is there for me? What have I to remember out of the long years?\n\nThe blue sky is weeping, but not for me. The rain is persistent and heavy as damnation. It falls on my mind and it maddens my mind. It falls on my soul and it hurts my soul.--Everything hurts my soul.--It falls on my heart and it warps the wood in my heart.\n\nOf womankind and nineteen years, a philosopher of the peripatetic school, a thief, a genius, a liar, and a fool--and unhappy, and filled with anguish and hopeless despair. What is my life? Oh, what is there for me!\n\nThere has always been Nothing. There will always be Nothing.\n\nThere was a miserable, damnable, wretched, lonely childhood. Itself has passed, but the pain of it has not passed. The pain of it is with me and is added to the pain of now. It is pain that never lets itself be forgotten. The pain of the childhood was the pain of Nothing. The pain of now is the pain of Nothing. Oh, the pathetic burlesque-tragedy of Nothing!\n\nIt is burlesque, but it is none the less tragedy. It is tragedy that eats its way inward.\n\nIt is only I and the sand and barrenness.\n\nI have never a tender thing in my life. The sand and barrenness has never a grass-blade.\n\nI want a human being to love me. I have need of it. I am starving to death for lack of it.\n\nBitterest salt tears surge upward--sobs are shaking themselves out from the depths. Oh, the salt is bitter. I might lay me down and weep all day and all night--and the salt would grow more bitter and more bitter.\n\nBut life in its Nothingness is more bitter still.\n\nIt is burlesque-tragedy that is the most tragic of all.\n\nIt is an inward dying that never ends. It is the bitterness of death added to the bitterness of life.\n\nWhat hell is there like that of one weak little human being placed on the earth--and left alone?\n\nThere are people who live and enjoy. But my soul and I--we find life too bitter, and too heavy to carry alone. Too bitter, and too heavy.\n\nOh, that I and my soul might perish at this moment, forever!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "13 April 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "I am sitting writing out on my sand and barrenness. The sky is pale and faded now in the west, but a few minutes ago there was the same old-time, always-new miracle of roses and gold, and glints and gleams of silver and green, and a river in vermilions and purples--and lastly the dear, the beautiful: the red, red line.\n\nThere also are heavy black shadows.\n\nI have given my heart into the keeping of this.\n\nAnd still, as always, I look at it--and feel it all with thrilling passion--and await the Devil’s coming.\n\nL’ENVOI:"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "28 October 1901", "synthetic_date": false, "title": null, "text": "And so there you have my Portrayal. It is the record of three months of Nothingness. Those three months are very like the three months that preceded them, to be sure, and the three that followed them--and like all the months that have come and gone with me, since time was. There is never anything different; nothing ever happens.\n\nNow I will send my Portrayal into the wise wide world. It may stop short at the publisher; or it may fall still-born from the press; or it may go farther, indeed, and be its own undoing.\n\nThat’s as may be.\n\nI will send it.\n\nWhat else is there for me, if not this book?\n\nAnd, oh, that some one may understand it!\n\n--I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel--everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.--\n\nMy Portrayal in its analysis and egotism and bitterness will surely be of interest to some. Whether to that one alone who may understand it; or to some who have themselves been left alone; or to those three whom I, on three dreary days, asked for bread, and who each gave me a stone--and whom I do not forgive (for that is the bitterest thing of all): it may be to all of these.\n\nBut none of them, nor any one, can know the feeling made of relief and pain and despair that comes over me at the thought of sending all this to the wise wide world. It is bits of my wooden heart broken off and given away. It is strings of amber beads taken from the fair neck of my soul. It is shining little gold coins from out of my mind’s red leather purse. It is my little old life-tragedy.\n\nIt means everything to me.\n\nDo you see?--it means everything to me.\n\nIt will amuse you. It will arouse your interest. It will stir your curiosity. Some sorts of persons will find it ridiculous. It will puzzle you.\n\nBut am I to suppose that it will also awaken compassion in cool, indifferent hearts? And will the sand and barrenness look so unspeakably gray and dreary to coldly critical eyes as to mine? And shall my bitter little story fall easily and comfortably upon undisturbed ears, and linger for an hour, and be forgotten?\n\nWill the wise wide world itself give me in my outstretched hand a stone?\n\nTHE END\n\n[Transcriber’s Notes:\n\nErrors in punctuation were repaired. Except for the following change, spelling has been preserved as printed in the original. On page 79, “buoyantly” was changed from “bouyantly” (float buoyantly on air).]\n\nEnd of Project Gutenberg's The Story of Mary MacLane, by Mary MacLane"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "8 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A crucible of my own making", "text": "It is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana.\n\nThe sky is overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy.\n\nAnd at this point I meet Me face to face.\n\nI am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.\n\nFace to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with great intentness.\n\nI put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:\n\nI am rare--I am in some ways exquisite.\n\nI am pagan within and without.\n\nI am vain and shallow and false.\n\nI am a specialized being, deeply myself.\n\nI am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other pointes.\n\nI am dynamic but devasted, laid waste in spirit.\n\nI’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse and I’m like an outlaw.\n\nI have a potent weird sense of humor--a saving and a demoralizing grace.\n\nI have brain, cerebration--not powerful but fine and of a remarkable quality.\n\nI am scornful-tempered and I am brave.\n\nI am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.\n\nI am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.\n\nI am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my truth.\n\nI am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.\n\nI am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.\n\nI am young, but not very young.\n\nI am wistful--I am infamous.\n\nIn brief, I am a human being.\n\nI am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling genius.\n\nAnd were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.\n\nSo assayed I begin to write this book of myself, to show to myself in detail the woman who is inside me. It may or it mayn’t show also a type, a universal Eve-old woman. If it is so it is not my purport. I sing only the Ego and the individual.\n\nSo does in secret each man and woman and child who breathes, but is afraid to sing it aloud. And mostly none knows it is that he does sing. But it is the only strength of each. A bishop serving truly and tirelessly the poor of his diocese serves a strong vanity and ideal of the Ego in himself. A starving sculptor who lives in and for his own dreams is an Egotist equally with the bishop. And both are Egotists equally with me.\n\nEgotist, not egoist, is my word: it and not the idealized one is the ‘winged word.’\n\nIt is made of glow and gleam and splendor, that Ego. I would be its votary.\n\nSo I write me this book of Me--my Soul, my Heart, my sentient Body, my magic Mind: their potentialities and contradictions.\n\n--there is a Self in each human one which lives and has its sweet vain someway-frightful being not in depths and not in surfaces but Just Beneath The Skin. It is the Self one keeps for oneself alone. It is the Essence of soul and bones. It is the slyest subtlest thing in human scope. It is the loneliest: tragically lonely. It is long, long isolation--beautiful, terrifying, barbarous, shameful, trivial to points of madness, ever-present, infinitely intriguing to oneself, passionately hidden: hidden forever and forever--\n\nIt is my aim to write out that in the pages of this Me-book: no depths save as they come up and touch that, no surfaces save as they sink skin-deep. Only the flat unglowing bloody Self Just Beneath My Skin.\n\nI shall fail in it, partly because my writing skill is unequal to some nicenesses in the task, but mostly because I am not very honest even with myself.\n\nI’ll come someway near it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "28 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Half inevitably, half by choice", "text": "Half inevitably, half by choice, I write this book now.\n\nI am at a lowering impatient shoulder-shrugging life-point where I must express myself or lose myself or break.\n\nAnd I am quite alone as I live my life.\n\nAnd I am unhappy--a scornful unhappiness not of bitter positive grief which admits of engulfing luxuries of sorrow, but of muffled unrests and tortures of knowing I fit in nowhere, that I drift--drift--and it brings an unbearable dread, always more and more dread, into days and into wakeful nights.\n\nAnd writing it turns the brunt of it a little away from me.\n\nAnd to write is the thing I most love to do.\n\nAnd I myself am the most immediate potent topic I can find in my knowledge to write on: the biggest, the littlest, the broadest, the narrowest, the loveliest, the hatefulest, the most colorful, the most drab, the most mystic, the most obvious, and the one that takes me farthest as a writer and as a person.\n\nI write myself when I write the thoughts smouldering in me whether they be of Death, of Roses, of Christ’s Mother, of Ten-penny Nails.\n\nOne’s thoughts are one’s most crucial adventures. Seriously and strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.\n\nI unfold myself in accursed and precious written thoughts. I cast the reflections of my inner selves on the paper from the insolent mirror of my Mind.\n\n--my Mind--it is so free--\n\nMy Soul is not free: God hung a string of curses, like a little manacling chain, round its neck long and long ago. Always I feel it. My Heart is not free for it is dead: in a listless way and a trivial way, dead. And my Body--it is free but has a seeming of something wasted and useless like a dinner spread out on a table uneaten and growing cold.\n\n--but my free Mind--\n\nThough I were shut fast in a prison: though I were strapped in an electric chair: though I were gnawed and decayed by leprosy: I still could think, with thoughts free as gold-drenched outer air, thoughts delicate-luminous as young dawn, thoughts facile, seductive, speculative, artful, evil, sly, sublime.\n\nYou might cut off my two hands: but you could not keep me from remembering the Sad Gray Loveliness of the Sea when the Rain beats, beats, beats upon it.\n\nYou might admonish me by driving a red-hot spike between my two white shoulders: but you could not by that influence my Thoughts--you could not so much as change their current.\n\nI am intently aware of my Mind from moment to moment--all the passing life-moments. The awareness is a troubled power, a heavy burden and a wild enchantment.--\n\nAlso what I feel I write.\n\nI am my own law, my own oracle, my own one intimate friend, my own guide though I guide me to dead-walls, my own mentor, my own foe, my own lover.\n\nI am in age one-and-thirty, a smouldering-flamed period which feels the wings of the Youth-bird beating strong and violent for flight--half-ready to fly away.\n\nI am not a charming person. Quite seventy singly-used adjectives would better fit me.\n\nBut I have some charm of youth, and a charm of sex, and a charm of intellect and intuition, and some charms of personality.\n\nI have a perfervid appreciation of those things in other persons. And my steel has sometime struck fire from their flint.\n\nBut always my steel has turned back drearily yet strongly to itself."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "22 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A twisted moral", "text": "If I should meet God to know and speak to the first thing but one I should ask him would be, ‘What was your idea, God, in making me?’\n\nI can believe he had some Purpose in it.\n\nI’m in most ways a devilish person. There’s sevenfold more evil than good in me. It is evil of a mixed and menacing kind, the kind that goes dressed in brave and beauty-tinted clothes and is sane and sound. While the good in me is ill and forlorn and nervously afraid--a something of tear-blurred eyes and trembling fingers.\n\nYet God has made many things less plausible than me. He has made sharks in the ocean, and people who hire children to work in their mills and mines, and poison ivy and zebras--\n\n--and he has made besides a Wonder of things: Thin Pink Mountain Dawns, Young English Poets, Hydrangeas in the sudden Blue of their first Bloom, human Singing Voices,--more things, always more--\n\nWhen I think of them all a joyous thrill breaks over me like a little frenzied wave. It is delirium-of-bliss to feel oneself living though shadows be pitch-black.\n\nGod has a Purpose in making everything, I think.\n\nI am half-curious about the Purpose that goes with me. He might have made me for his own amusement. He might have made me to discipline my Soul with some blights and goads or to punish it for bacchanalian ease and pleasure in the long-distant centuries-old past. He might have made me to season or scourge other lives, as I may touch them, with Mary-Mac-Lane-ness. He might have made me to point a twisted moral.\n\nI muse about it with doubts.\n\nBut if I knew my Purpose I belike would not swerve a hair’s-breadth from my own course which is an unhallowedly selfish one.\n\nIf I could myself see a way of truth I would walk in it. I have it in me to worship. I long to worship. And I am game, wearily and coldly game: when I start I go on through to the end.\n\nBut I see no way of truth--none for me. And God is eternally absent and reticent. So I go on in the way where I find myself. And muse about it. And damn it faintly as I make nothing of it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "19 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Everyday and to-morrow", "text": "Aloofly I live in this Butte in the outward rôle of a family daughter with no responsibilities.\n\nThis Butte is an incongruous living-place for me.\n\nAnd I have not one human friend in it--no kindliness. And Nature in her perplexingest mood would not of herself have cast me as a family daughter. Three things have kept me thus for four years past: that nothing has called me out of it: a slight family pressure like a tiny needle-point which pierces only if one moves: and to stay thus is presently the line of least resistance.\n\nUnless impelled to violent action by a violent reason--like love or hatred or jealousy or a baby or humiliated pride or rowelling ambition--a woman follows the physical line of least resistance. I have followed it these years with outward acquiescence and inward rages--languid rages which lay me waste.\n\nThe years and acquiescences and rages have built up a mood which compasses me, drives me, damns me and lifts me up.\n\nIt is a forceful mood, though I am not myself forceful.\n\nThis mood is this book.--\n\nI live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile. All my Tissues of body, soul, mind and heart are wasting, decaying, wearing down, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day: with no return to me or to my life, nor to anything human or divine.\n\nIt makes me dread my life and myself.\n\nI do not quite know why.\n\nBut to be an ardent pickpocket or an eager harlot would feel honester.\n\nMy Everyday goes like this: I waken in the morning and lie listless some minutes with drooping eyelids. I look at a gilt-and-blue bar of morning light which slants palely in at one window and at a melting-gold triangle of sun which shows at the other window on the red brick wall of the house next to this. Then I say ‘another day,’ and I kick off bed-covers with one foot and slide out of my narrow bed, and into blue slippers, and out of a thin nightgown, and into peignoir or bathrobe. I twist and flatten and gather up my tangled hair and push some amber pins through it. And I go into a respectable green-and-gray bathroom and draw a bath and get into it. I splash in brief swift soapsuds, and go under a sudden heroic icy cold shower, and dry me with a scourging towel. Then I go back into the blue-white bed-room and get into clothes, feminine thin under-garments and a nunlike frock.\n\nI look in my mirror. Some days I’m a delicately beautiful girl. Other days I’m a very plain woman.\n\nOne’s physical attractiveness is a matter of one’s mental chemistry.\n\nI say to Me in the mirror, ‘It’s you-and-me, Mary MacLane, and another wasting damning To-morrow.\n\n“To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”’\n\nA haunting decadence is in that To-morrow thought. And always the To-morrow thought comes out of my morning mirror. I dwell on it awhile, till my gray eyes and my lips and my teeth and my forehead are tired of it, and make nothing new of it.\n\nI jerk the flat scollop of hair at one side of my forehead and turn away. I open door and windows wider for the blowing-through of breezes. And I wander down-stairs. It is half-after nine or half-after ten. I go into the clean empty clock-ticking kitchen and cook my breakfast. It is a task full of hungry plaisance and pleasantness. I make a British-feeling breakfast of tea and marmalade and little squares of toast and pink-and-tan rashers of bacon and two delightful eggs. Up to the moment of broaching the eggs the morning has an ancient sameness with other mornings. But eggs, though I’ve eaten them every day for quite five-and-twenty years, are always a fascinating novelty.\n\nThey are delicious in my breakfast. So are the squares of toast and the bacon-rashers and the tea and marmalade. When I’ve done with them I lay down my napkin by my cup, light a cigarette, breathe a puff or two from it and feel contentedly aware that my brain has gone to rest in sweet tranquillity with my breakfast. When my brain is in my head it analyzes the soul out of my body, the gleam out of my gray eyes, the savor out of my life, the human taste off my tongue. That post-breakfast moment is the only peace-moment I know in my day and in my life.\n\nHaving puffed away the cigarette and read bits of a morning paper I then prove me arrantly middle-class by contemplating washing my breakfast dishes.\n\nI am middle-class, quite, from the Soul outward. But it is not specially apparent--one’s tastes and aspirations flit garbledly far and wide. But a tendency to wash one’s dishes after eating one’s breakfast feels conclusively and pleasantly middle-class. Not that I do always wash them, but always I think of it with the inclination to do it.\n\nI sit on the shaded front veranda in the summer noon-day and look away south at the blue Highlands, ever snow-peaked: or east at the near towering splendid grim wall of the arid Rockies which separates this Butte from New York, from London,--the Spain-castles--the Pyramids--the Isle of Lesbos: or south-west beyond house-tops at some foothills above which hangs a fairy veil made by melting together a Lump of Gold and an Apricot and spreading it thin.\n\nThen restlessly I go into the house and up to my room. I put it in order--in prim, prim immaculate order. One marked phase of mine is of some wanton creature--a mænad, a mental Amazon, a she-imp. But playing opposite to that is another--that of a New-England spinster steel-riveted to certain neat ferociously-orderly habits. A stray thread on my blue rug hurts, hurts me until I pick it up. Dust around my room gives me a nervous pain, a piteous gnawing grief-of-the-senses, until I’ve removed it. And my chastened-looking bed--after I’ve turned over its tufted mattress and ‘made’ it, smooth and white and crisp and soft--how the fibers of me would writhe should anyone sit on it. But no one sits on it. And I myself sooner than press one finger-tip down into its perfectness would sell my body to a Balkan soldier for four dimes: it is that way I feel about it. My bed must be kept perfect till the moment I slip into it at night to float under the dream-worlds.\n\nThen maybe I pull a soft black hat down over my hair and draw on gloves and go out into the gray-paved streets for a longish walk. Or maybe the day is humidly hot. Then I don’t go but stay in the blue-white room and mend a bit of torn lingerie or a handkerchief or a silk stocking or a petticoat. Or I take books and dig out some Greek--Homer or a Sapphic fragment--very laboriously but marvelling that I can do it at all: the first things one forgets being the last things one learned at school. Or I read an English or a French philosopher, or a translated Tolstoi, or a bit of Balzac novel, or some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the pungent appetizing charm of their villains.\n\nAnd betweenwhiles I think and think.\n\nThen it’s dinnertime and I perhaps change into the other nunlike dress, and nibble some dinner with no appetite, and talk with the assembled small family in a vein and tone of life-long insincerity. When in family-circle-ness I’ve had to hide my true self as if behind a hundred black veils since the age of two years. It would be a poignant effort now to show any of it at the family dinners, which is the only meeting-time. The one easy way is to be comprehensively insincere at the dinners where with no appetite I nibble. None there wants my sincerity, and so in my Soul’s accounting now it is eternally and determinedly No Matter. It is a little bell which stopped ringing long and long ago. If it rang now it would ring only No-Matter, No-Matter.\n\nThen it’s night and I go to take the walk I didn’t take in the afternoon. I walk down long lonely streets. Long lonely thoughts pile into me and through me and wrap me in a nebula that I can feel around me like a mantle. I walk two or three miles of paved streets till I’m very tired. I am lithe but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis. One may analyze one’s life-experience and life-emotion till physical tissues at times grow frail, gossamer-thin. It is then as if--at a word, a whispered thought, a beat of the heart--one’s Soul might flutter through the Veil, join light hands with the death-angel and flee away.\n\n--but I love my life even while I analyze it bit by bit and so hate it. I love it in its grating monotones and its moments of glow and its days of shadow and storm and bitterish lowering passion--\n\nI walk back beneath a night sky of dusky velvet-blue decked with jewels of moon and star and flying bright-edged cloud. The night has a subdued preciousness, like an illicitly pregnant woman’s. It is big with the bastard-exquisite To-morrow. The night air kisses my lips and throat. I pull off my gloves to feel it on my hands. It gives me a charmed and unexciting feeling of being caressed without being loved.\n\nI come back to my blue-white room, take off my hat, ruffle my fingers through my hair, look at Me in the mirror and smile the melancholy wicked smile which I keep for Me-alone. It’s an intimate moment of greeting--a recognition of my Familiar on coming back to her. Often when I walk I go without Me, and wander far from Me, and forget Me.\n\nThen I sit at my flat black desk and write desultorily for two or three or four hours. Sometimes a letter, sometimes some verses or a hectic fancy in staid prose. But now mostly this.\n\nThen I go downstairs to a refrigerator or a cellar-way to find food--a slice off an affable cold joint, some chaste-looking slices of bread, a slim innocent onion. And I eat them, not relishingly but voraciously, reminding myself of a lean foraging furtive coyote. It is two or three or four in the morning. I smoke a quiet cigarette in a cool night doorway and count the nervous gray-velvet moths outside the screen.\n\nAnd all the while I think and think.\n\nThen I come up to my room and sit on the floor by my low bookcase and read some last-century English poets--the Brownings and Shelley and the unspeakable John Keats. The Poets make me a space of incalescent magic and loveliness. They are the beings blest of a flaming Heaven. In the midst of soddenest earthiness their fiery wings ‘pierce the night.’\n\nThen I’m thrilledly tired. I close the books and make ready for my bed in a lyric-feeling languor. A soft soothing unsnapping of whalebone stays: a muffled rhythmic undoing of metal-and-silk-rubber garters: a pushing down and sliding out of daytime clothes and into a thin pale cool silk nightgown: a hurried brushing of hair: an anointing of hands and throat with faint-scented cream: a goodnight to Me in the mirror: a last wave of a fateful thing--my life-essence--casual and determined and contemptuous and menacing--sweeping down over me in an invisible shower: and I’m betwixt smooth linen sheets.\n\nIn twenty seconds blest, blest sleep.\n\nOf such wide littleness is my day made. One day will differ from another in this or that volcanic molehill. And some days I not only wash a great many dishes but do a deal of housework neatly and self-satisfactorily and like a devilish scullery maid.\n\nAnd some days as I move in the petty pace thoughts and feelings sweet or barbarous come and change my world’s face in a moment.\n\nAlso a casual human being of rabbitish brain and chipmunkish sensibility may stray across my path and gently bore me and accentuate my own paganness.\n\nBut always the same days in restless dubious To-morrowness.\n\nAlways immorally futile.\n\nAnd eerily alone."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "17 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A mathematic dead-wall", "text": "I’m put to it to decide whether God loves me or hates me when he sets me down alone.\n\nThere are times when my Loneliness is a charmed and scintillant and resourceful Loneliness with a strange and ecstatic gleam in it. The miracle of being a person rushes upon and about and into me ‘with lightning and with music.’\n\nOne loses that in a day of many friendships.\n\nBut oftener are times when the tired, tired heart and the weary, weary brain beat-beat, beat-beat to anguished torturing self-rhythms. The spirit of me closes its eyes in turbulent dusks of wondering and wishing and leans its forehead against a mathematic dead-wall. And it prays--blind useless unhumble prayers which leave it dry and destitute, arid, unspeakably lacking. But when it lifts its head and opens its eyes there are the melting mauves and maroons of a dead sun across the evening sky, and the small far wistful flames of always-hopeful stars.\n\n--they make it matter less whether God loves or hates me, but I still wish I knew."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "23 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "My neat blue chair", "text": "I suppose there’s nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel.\n\nMy only elemental ‘differentness’ is that I find it and write it.\n\nBut I used to think at eighteen--those thrice-fired adolescent moments--that only I suffered, only I reached achingly out into the mists, only I tasted new-bloomed life-petals intolerably sweet and bitter on my lips.\n\nThe egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable. Youth plays on itself as one plays on a little dulcimer, with music as sweet, but with a crude cruel recklessness which jerks and breaks the strings.\n\nI have got by that stage of egotism. But I’ve entered on another wilder, more lawless--farther-seeing if less be-visioned.\n\nWhile I sit here this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this Butte-Montana for what I know a legion-women of my psychic breed may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat any-colored chairs--in Wichita-Kansas and South Bend-Indiana and Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-New York and Waco-Texas and La Crosse-Wisconsin and Bowling Green-Kentucky: each feeling Herself set in a wrong niche, caught in a tangle of little vapidish cross-purpose: each waiting, waiting always--waiting all her life--not hopeful and passionate like Eighteen but patient or blasphemous or scornful or volcanic like Early-Thirty: the waiting-sense giving to each a personal quality big and suggestive and nurturing--and with it a long-accustomed feeling like a thin bright blade stuck deep in her breast: each more or less roundly hating Waco-Texas and Portland-Maine and Red Wing-Minnesota and the other places: and each beset by hot unquiet humannesses inside her and an old yearn of sex and the blood warring with myriad minute tenets dating from civilization’s dawn-times.\n\nBut though I am of that psychic breed no little tenets war in me.\n\nIt’s as if a prelate and a wood-nymph had fathered and mothered me: making me of a ridiculous poignant conscience and of no human traditions.\n\nI am free of innate conventionalities, free as a wildcat on a twilight hill. I am free of them as I sit here, quiet-looking in my plain black dress. The virile Scotch-Canadian curl is brushed and brushed out of my hair to make it lie smooth and discreet over my ears and forehead. My feet are shod daintily like a charming girl’s. My nails are pinkly polishedly pointed. My narrow black eyebrows look nearly patrician in their sereneness. My lips are stilly sad. My eyelids droop like the sucking dove’s. But my gray eyes beneath the lids--when I raise them to the glass, my own Essence looks out of them, tiredly vivid. It seems made of languor and barbaricness and despair: and vague guiltiness, and some pure disastrous heathen religion, and lust: and lurid consciousness of everyday things and smouldering melancholy and blazing loving hatred of life.\n\nMy gray eyes out-look the wildcat’s on a twilight hill.\n\nBut--so far as the Sitting goes--I sit here in my Neat Blue Chair the same as they all sit in any-colored chairs in their Wichitas and La Crosses."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "4 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A lost person", "text": "I am wandering about, a Lost Person, wandering and lost.\n\nNot magnificently lost in wide Gothic forest closes, with strong great blackish green trunks and branches all around overwhelming and thrilling me.\n\nNot dramatically lost on desert reefs with breakers riding up like menacing hosts and joyously drowning me.\n\nBut lost surprisingly in a small clump of shoulder-high hazel-brush. In it are some wood-ticks, and a few caterpillars, and a few wan spiders which spin little desultory webs from twig to twig and then abandon them for other twigs. Underfoot are unexpected wet places at intervals that my high hard heels sink into exasperatingly.\n\nI walk round and round and across in the hazel-brush groping and knowing I’m lost in it but knowing little else of it: knowing no way out of it.\n\nThe bushes bear green leaves--rather small ones and warped because the clump is in a half-shaded place back of a hill. And they bear hazel-nuts, but not very good ones--mostly shell."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "27 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A thin damnedness", "text": "I own Two plain black Dresses and none besides.\n\nAnd I need no more.\n\nIn which two sentences I touch the crux and the keynote and the thin damnedness of my life as it is set: of my life, not of myself, for myself lives naked inside the circle of my life.\n\nBut my outer life is spaced by my Two plain Dresses. My Two Dresses measure how far removed I presently am from the wide world of things.\n\nIn the world of things a woman is judged not specifically by her morals: not invariably by her reputation: not absolutely by her money: not indubitably by her social prestige: only relatively by her beauty: and as to her brain or lack of it--la-la-la! She is judged in the matter-world simply, completely, entirely by her clothes. It is tacitly so agreed and decreed all over the earth--wherever women are of the female sex and men pursue them.\n\nIt is no injustice to any woman. It is the fairest fiat in the unwritten code.\n\nOnly a few women, the few specialized breeds, can express the fire or the humanness in them by play-acting or suffragetting or singing or painting or writing or trained-nursing or house-keeping. But there’s not one--from a wandering Romany gypsy, red-blooded and strong-hearted, to an over-guarded overbred British princess--who doesn’t express what she is in the clothes she wears and the way she wears them.\n\nHer clothes conceal and reveal, artfully and contradictorily and endlessly.\n\nIt is all a limitless field.\n\nNo actor could act Hamlet without that perfect Hamletesque black costume.\n\nA nun’s staid beautiful habit interprets her own meanings within and without.\n\nA woman naked may look markedly pure: the same woman clothed conventionally and demurely may achieve a meanly ghoulishly foul seeming.\n\nOne either is made or marred by one’s habiliments.\n\nA woman by her raiment’s make and manner can express more of her wit, her ego, her temper, her humor, her plastic pulsating personality than she could by throwing a bomb, by making a good or bad pudding, by losing her chastity or by traducing her neighbor. The germ and shadow and likelihood of each of those acts is in the fashion and line and detail of her garments.\n\nA jury thinks it tries a woman for a crime. Some of the twelve good and true may admit each to himself that they are trying the color of her eyes or the shape of her chin or the droop of her shoulders. But it’s only her clothes they unwittingly try for murder or theft or forgery, or whatever has tripped her. It may be an alluringly shabby little dress that saves her from the gallows. It may be a hat worn at the wrong angle that is found guilty and sentenced to death. A glove in her lap, a fluttering veil, a little white handkerchief dropped to the floor by her chair--those are what the court tries for life or liberty.--\n\nBut it is I I tell about, I and my Two plain Dresses.\n\nIn me a smart frock or an unbecoming one makes a surprising difference. I impress my costume with my mixed temperament and it retaliates in kind.\n\nOne day I looked a beautiful young creature--one August Saturday in New York it was--in a tailored gown of embroidered linen. With it I wore such a good hat: its color was pale olive: its texture was soft Milan straw: its price was forty dollars. My shoes were gray silk. I so fancied myself that day that I feared lest my writing talent had gone away from me. For God takes away the beer if he gives you the skittles. And in ill-conditioned clothes--some days the weather, the devil, the soddenness of life get into one’s garments and make even fair ones look ill-conditioned--I am plain-faced, plain all over--so plain that the villainies of my nature feel doubtful and I half-think I may be a good woman.\n\nIn a life full of people I would own varied delicate beautiful clothes since it is by them one is judged, and since I am quite vain. But no people are in my life. I feel deadlocked. I am caught in a vise made by my own analytic ratiocination. I am not free to live a world-life till I’ve someway expressed Me and learned if not whither I go at least where I stand.\n\nSo it’s Two plain Dresses I own and none besides.\n\nIt may be I shall not ever again need more.\n\nThe Two Dresses are at present of serge and voile. Their identity changes with change of fashion and with wearing out. They are cut well and fit me well. But the Two does not change, nor the plainness. I change only from one Frock to the other and from the other to the one again.\n\nI have various other clothes. A woman--whatever her traits and tempers--garners what she can of handmade under-linens and dainty nightgowns and silk hose and all such private panoply. They are the apparel of her sex rather than her individuality. The uncognizant world is unable to judge her by them. But the woman herself judges and respects herself by the goodness of her intimate garments.\n\nMy sex is to me a mystic gift. I marvel over it and clothe it silkenly.\n\nAlso I own a healthful-looking percale house-gown or two in which I do housework.\n\nBut my passing life, my eerie lonely life, is lived in my Two Dresses and none besides, and I need no more."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "17 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A prison of self", "text": "My Two Dresses tell me the scope of my present Mary-Mac-Lane-ness.\n\nEvery day they tell me things about myself.\n\nThey tell me I’m living in a prison of self, invisible and ascetic and somberly just.\n\nThey tell me I’m living an outer life narrow and broodingly companionless and that if I were not self-reliant by long habit a leprous morbidness would rot me in body and spirit.\n\nThey tell me because of outer solitude an inner fever of emotion and egotism and a fervid analytic light are on all my phases of self: mental, physical, psychical and sexual.\n\nThey tell me my way of thought is at once meditative and cave-womanish.\n\nThey tell me I’m all ways the Unmarried Woman and profoundly loverless.\n\nThey tell me I’m like a child and like a sequestered savage.\n\nThey tell me I am having no restful unrealities of social life with chattering women and no monotonous casually bloodthirsty flirtations with men.\n\nThey tell me I walk daily to the edges of myself and stare into horrible-sweet egotistic abysses.\n\nThey tell me I’m grave-eyed and coldly melancholy.\n\nThey tell me there’s a bereftness in the curves of my breasts and an unfulfillment in my loose-girt loins.\n\nThey tell me I am barren of sensation and fertile in feeling.\n\nThey tell me God has taken away the beer and also the skittles and left me only pieces of bread and drinks of water."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "11 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A winding sheet", "text": "The least important thing in my life is its tangibleness.\n\nThe only things that matter lastingly are the things that happen inside me.\n\nIf I do a cruel act and feel no cruelty in my Soul it is nothing. If I feel cruelty in my Soul though I do no cruel act I’m guilty of a sort of butchery and my spirit-hands are bloody with it.\n\nThe adventures of my spirit are realer than the outer things that befall me.\n\nTo dwell on the self that is known only to me--the self that is intricate and versatile, tinted, demi-tinted, deep-dyed, luminous, gives me an intimate delectation, a mental inflorescence and sometimes an exaltation. It is not always so but it can be so. But always to look back on the mass of outer events that have made my tangible life darkens my day.\n\nIntrospection throws a witching spell around me, though it may be a black one.\n\nBut retrospection wraps me in a Winding Sheet.\n\nWhen the day is already dark from low-hanging clouds--and often when the sun is bright, bright, bright--I walk my floor and think of my scattered life-flotsam with a frown at the eyebrows: a coarse and heavy and twisted frown.\n\nTo-day was a leaden day. The air held a quality like the infernal breath of dead people. I leaned elbows on my dull window-sill and looked off at green and purple mountains. I tried to think of some reason--some reason tangible or poetic--for living.\n\nI wore my brocade Chinese coat fastened down the left side with round flashing glass buttons and embroidered with blue bats and gardenias: and with it a crinkly crêpe-silk petticoat: and silk shoes and respectable white silk stockings. I felt righteous because in the forenoon I had done much housework. I worked thoroughly and well, swearing and repeating poetry softly to lend me impetus. And afterward I felt useful and good.\n\nBut having changed from Dutch cap and apron and domesticness to scented silk and my sad window I grew suddenly frail and vulnerable. Shadows stormed my wall and scaled it and entered in and sacked my castle. I lounged away from my window, folded my arms in my loose blue sleeves and slowly walked my floor. I had no strength within to combat shadows.\n\nI picked up two alien shreds, of lint and paper respectively, from the rug, but inside me undigested and indigestible memories had their own way.\n\nThey brought close an unsatisfying and dissatisfying vista of Mary MacLanes.\n\nThere was a stubborn baby in Winnipeg-Canada, as I’ve heard, a baby with a white skin, coldly pensive dark-blue eyes, no hair, no voice, hand-worked muslin frocks and a fat lumpish mien.\n\nIt was this Mary MacLane.\n\nThere was a three-year-old child, as I dimly remember, still in Canada and still stubborn, with a stout keg-like pink-and-white body, baffling blue eyes, a tiny voice, thick sun-colored curls, cambric frocks and short white socks and a morose temper. She had one love, a yellow tortoise-shell kitten which she hugged and hugged with violence until one day it died surprisingly in her arms.\n\nIt was this Mary MacLane.\n\nThere was a seven-year-old child in Minnesota, as I well remember, still stubborn and still often morose, with a thin bony little body, conscious gray eyes, a tanned face, weather-beaten hands, untidy frocks, beautiful fluffy golden hair, a tendency to secretiveness and lies, a speculative mind, fantastic day-dreams and a free hoydenish way of life. She had playmates but no loves except an objective love for quiet greenwoods and sweet meadows and windy hills and hay-filled barns, and for the surface details of life. She had subjective hatreds for being fussed over, for being teased and for relatives.\n\nIt was this Mary MacLane.\n\nThere was a thirteen-year-old person, as I well remember, in a windy Montana town, who was neither girl, child nor savage but was a mixture of the three. She had a devilish contrary will and temper, the unenlightened inexpressive wholly unattractive face and features of early adolescence, a self-love that had not the dignity of egotism and a devouring appetite for reading. She read everything she happened on--from Voltaire to Nick Carter: from ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ to Fox’s Book of Martyrs. She read Alexander Pope and Victor Hugo and John Stuart Mill. She read ‘Lena Rivers’ by Mary J. Holmes: also Confucius: and the Brothers Grimm. She had a long-legged lanky frame, conscious gray eyes, lovely coppery-gold dark hair and a silly headful of tangled irrational thoughts. She had pathetic impossible day-dreams. She had few companions and no loves but much hatred for most things sane, sensible and honest.\n\nIt was this Mary MacLane.\n\nThere was an eighteen-year-old girl in this Butte, as I well remember, with the outward savagery tamed out of her by studiousness. She was slim but no longer lanky and owned a white-hot aliveness and a grace. She had repelling gray eyes and the beautiful coppery hair, and about her an isolation, a complete aloofness. Her spirit fed itself on wonderful and exquisite dreams alternated by moods of young passionate woe, analyzed and torn to shreds: all of it hid beneath a very quiet surface. She had outwardly a tense markedly virginal quality but was inwardly insolently demi-vierge. She had no companions, no friendships. She absorbed herself in digging knowledge out of her high school text-books, studying and imagining over it, and wandering in the fascinating highways which it opened to her. She was at her moment of brain-awakening, soul-awakening, sex-awakening, life-awakening, world-awakening: it uncurtained windows of magic old sorrow for her to look from. She had no characteristic weaknesses--she was strongly and scornfully courageous. It and the need of self-expression, born of her teeming spirit and life-long suppression of it, led her to write herself out in a book, which was published. It was a poetic book and had insight and vision and a riot of color with youth as its keynote. And it was human and figuratively and literally full of the devil. The far-and-wide public in England and America read it, and the newspapers made a loud noise about it and the lonely girl who wrote it found herself oddly notorious. It brought money which made her free of Butte and it brought human things into her life which changed her life forever. And it brought her no inner or outer excitement or elation.\n\nIt was this Mary MacLane.\n\nThere was a girl of six-and-twenty in Boston and in New York who had half-forgot her long-familiar Ego for several years. She lived and moved in folly and triviality and falseness. From having had too few companions she had too many who did her no good and no harm but helped her waste passing days and dissipate her moods and mental tissues. She had grown worldly in taste, weak in manner of thought, fragile in body from a mad irregularity of food and sleep, and in every attribute uncertain of herself. Her Soul lay sleeping: her Heart because it felt too keenly worked overtime: nothing engaged her Mind. But her analytic trend stayed by and with it she pulled to bits the varied fragmentary things she encountered. She learned New York town in human sordid enlightening disciplining ways. She learned people of many kinds in many ways. She learned other young women, which depressed and exhilarated and perplexed her. She learned men--a race whose make and motive toward women bears no analysis. She had not the usual defensive armor of the normal woman, for she was not a normal woman but certain trends of varying individuals gathered into one sensitive woman-envelope. She was careless toward men in their crude sex-rapacity in ways no ‘regular’ woman would dare or care to be. No man could wring one tear from her, nor cause a quickening of her foolish Heart, nor any emotion in her save mirth. And there were women friends-- There were some friendships whose ill effects she will never recover from, from having bestowed too much of herself on them in the headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after her long young loneliness.\n\n--she could not cherish anything sanely. She couldn’t stand in her doorway and watch a pretty bird flying above a green hedge, and admire it for the gleam of its brilliant wings in the sun, and let it go. She must needs run out--leaving her door standing open and tea-and-cakes untasted within--and follow where the bird flew, through mire and brier, round the world--\n\nFrom the odd notoriety were many letters and experiences and adventures. She met some famous persons--writers, actors, artists--of agreeable philosophic plaisances. She saw her book of youth burlesqued with artistic piquance in the Weber-and-Fields show of its season (with one Collier, adroitest of comedians, cast as her long-lost Devil). There was a hasty voyage to the edge of Europe--a voyage of terrific seasickness lying in her stateroom: a half-glimpse of Paris all gray and green in the rain: a whole glimpse of London, mystic, Dickensesque and roundly British in its yellow-brown fog: and back again within ten days with more berth-ridden seasickness lasting from Cherbourg to New York harbor: the whole adventure grown from a Spring morning impulse. There were winters in Florida at sun-flooded resort towns full of gaudiness and gambling and surprising winter-resort people. Those were mongrel wastrel years empty of every realness, every purpose, every vantage: they filled her with a bastard wisdom.\n\nIt was this Mary MacLane.\n\nThere was a girl of seven-and-twenty worn to psychic fragments and returned on a winter’s day in a mood of indifference to this Butte. It was her first return since she and her book had gone forth eight years before. She celebrated it by being brought low with a baleful blood-sucking demon of illness, what is called scarlet fever. Borne upon by the mountain altitude after sea-levels and getting in the way of epidemic germs, she had no chance. A strong feverish serpent wound itself around her, consuming and destroying. There were tortured dying weeks. She had never been ill before in all her life. This was the most crucial bodily adventure she had known. It opened a new and dreadful world. There was no passing of time in those long, long weeks, no rational thinking, no day, no night, no dark, no morning, no memory. There was pain, and utter weariness, and a feeling of being hurried to her grave. There was an air of hurry in the stillness around, as if she and Death had made a date which she would be late in keeping unless she were urged on. There was a doctor, and a crisp white starched nurse, and there were interminable bitter drugs and tall narrow glasses of monotonous milk. She was endlessly disturbed by milk and medicine, and by cold spongings and changings of feverish bed-linens, and anointings with olive oil, and takings of her temperature, and sprayings of her throat: when she wanted only to sink down, down, forever and forever to the underworld. She almost sank. But God capriciously decided he had other plans for her--insomuch as decreeing she was not to be let go then. After seven weeks she tiredly rose from her bed and took stock of herself. Her rôle then was of a horrible yellow skeleton with negative gray eyes, a wreck of tissue and vitality such as only scarlet fever can achieve, and her beautiful thick coppery hair changed to a strange short mouse-colored tangle. She was a long time recovering. The scarlet demon changed her life and its meanings and energies and outlooks more effectually than if she had been trapped by a game-at-law and gaols and courts had had their toll of her. But after months, a year and a half of months, her health came back perfect if not vigorous, and her good looks--the few she ever had, and even the humanizing incongruous curls, though changed, grew long and covered her head again in a heathen frivol. A so magnificent mystery is this blood-and-flesh. It grows up again out of its ashes. Burn all of it but one cell in the scorchingest sickness and so that bones are still whole it will renew itself from that, perfect as the sweet-bay. But this mind, less magnificent and less mysterious and more delicate and dubious, rallies only by aid of the heart beneath it and the soul beyond it. Her mind came slowly out of darkened apathy. It lived in a high-walled cloister telling its languid beads by rote. But as if it sensed the sweet aura of her renewed body it at last woke strong and cold overnight and was aware again of itself and the mourning magic of being.\n\nIt was this Mary MacLane.\n\nAnd after a year or two more it is this Mary MacLane.\n\nIt is I myself.\n\nI walk my floor in leaden retrospect-days with a feel in my throat of damned and damning unfulfillment and at my eyebrows the twisted frown.\n\nIn it is dread and anguish and worriment: in it is hideous altering breaking prepollence of death.\n\n--if my hair, just my hair, had not come back after that red fever I’d have decided--not capriciously like God but determinedly like myself--to have died by my own hand one night. It is no brave thought and it would have been no brave deed. Though it wants a lowering courage to leave life when, despite all, one loves its very textureless color, its bodiless air: not to speak of the yellow hot deathless sunshine that can not reach one in her dark grave--\n\nBut the look and feel of my hair are the look and feel of positive life, opposed to death.\n\nTo live up to my hair would keep me brave.\n\nBut the retrospects, which I can’t escape, come and wrap me in the Winding Sheet."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "28 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The Dover road", "text": "I lay down at noonday on my green couch and I had a quaint dream. I have just awakened from it in a flush of languor and comfort. And the dream is vivid in my mind. I dreamed I was married and it was pink-and-pearl dawn in my married bed-room. And in the bed one inch away from mine was not my married husband but ‘another man.’ It was no man I can recall having seen. As I look back into the dream he seems of the nowhere, a stranger. But in the dream he was no stranger. I had crudely admitted him to my night. And I had just awakened in the pink-and-white dawn and was sitting silk-gowned and ruffle-haired in my bed, cross-legged like a tailor with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my palms, idly contemplating him. And he was lying in the other narrow bed contemplating me and smiling a little. He had nice teeth and yellowish hair. The crux of the dream was the sound ‘off-stage’ of the approaching footsteps of monsieur-the-husband. As it always is in the psychology of dreams the insistent thing in the situation was not the footsteps, nor even that they were approaching, but the sound: the elusive threat of their sound. He would presently discover us. Nobody appeared to care: not ‘another man’ smiling so tranquilly: not I sitting musingly overlooking him who had overnight ‘enjoyed me’: not the husband, because he never knew it--before he could open the guilty door I awoke.\n\nA short-cut gently headlong dream. I was at once married, mixed adulterantly with an imperfect stranger and awaiting in pleasant mild anticipation, to match the pink-and-pearl of the summer dawn, the climax in the approaching sound of my husband’s footsteps. It was humorous and artistic. Unseemly preliminaries were done away with in that dream. I was given at once the one exciting worthwhile moment in it.\n\nHaving no data as to what were my husband’s temper and tenor, what he looked like or who he was, I could not in the dream or out of it surmise what he would say or how he would act when he opened the door.\n\n--a theme for idling speculation in a summer’s day--\n\nAlso I wonder whence came that dream: so Unexpected: so Irrelevant to any thought in me: so Artistically Right: so Disgusting: so Dramatic: so quaintly Vulgar.\n\nA question: to which the one answer is that unanswerable answer to all questions, propounded by Mr. F.’s Aunt--‘There’s milestones on the Dover road.’"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "24 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The harp of worn strings", "text": "May I own no unleavened egotism.\n\nMay I own no egotism that is not sensitive and poignant and vibrant: a harp of Worn Strings.\n\nThe surprising world is full of non-analytic persons of ox-eyed vision and hen-headed mental caliber whose egotism is a stupendous impregnable armor: those who burned the Maid of Orleans: those who crucified the prophet of Nazareth: those who killed John Keats.\n\nThey inherit the earth, which is a Golden-Green earth, but never look at it.\n\nThey accept this life, which is Intoxicating life, but never feel its texture with their fingers.\n\nThey gather a Blue iris by a marsh-edge and let it die in their sweating hands, or let it fall to the ground as they walk, or throw it away when the Blue petals droop: without looking at it and breathing it and knowing it: without sensing the tremulous Blue to be lovelier in its wilting.\n\nTheirs is the thick fat solidly-fierce egotism of an emperor or an infant whose main metaphysic concept is that he is alive, and will remain alive, and must be alive, though all around him bleed drop by drop to their death.\n\nI have analyzed mine, and it is not so with me.\n\nIf I say I am enchanting or false or despicable it is because I know it’s true. Not because I say it but because I have tested and proved it. I feel the textures of my life with the tips of my fingers. I turn my senses outward and let the old winds blow over them--icy, balmy, harsh, gentle, scorching, cooling. I suffer for it but I know those winds: songs of seas and stars and of little pebbles are in their thunderous-dim wailing: life is in the soft stinging perfume of their wings.\n\nNo breath of poetry and beauty comes to me that I do not pay for with the beating ache of my Heart, the nervous tensions of my Body, the fraying and shredding of my Soul. If any beauty or poet-thing comes easily and gives me pleasure and not pain, I know I have not yet got it and that it will come again.\n\nIt will come again: with the pain.\n\nI can’t eat cake and have it.\n\nI can’t make silk purses out of sows’ ears.\n\nThose things I learn nearly perfectly from playing on my harp with the Worn Strings."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "12 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A strongly-windy Saturday", "text": "It is a strongly-windy Saturday.\n\nA thought achieves itself in my roiled-and-placid brain: that one half of me is Mad, but the other half is doubly Sane and someway over-Sane, so that in it all I break a little better than even."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "24 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A someway separate individual", "text": "This Body I live in is familiar and mysterious.\n\nIt is like a book of poetry to read and read again.\n\nIt has the owned sentientness of bone-and-flesh, and with it tremors fine as spirit-emotions.\n\nMy Body is more chaste than my Mind, my Heart and my Soul. My Body if fragile is healthful, and is one with the woman-race: it moves with the sunlit cosmos. My Mind wanders in sex-chaos and muses on piquant impure things, enchanting villainies, odd inversions, whatnot. My Soul--a sweet and an exquisite Thing--its tired wings have borne it languidly down the dim stairways of many centuries, some leading in wilful perverted ways. And my Heart is a pagan Heart. Its essence is flavored with the day and lyric trail of the Sapphic students.\n\nBodily I am also pagan in the freedom of my owned sex feelings--as are all women. Most of them do not know it and those who do hide it in a tomb-like silence, except the brazen, the headlongly honest and the artlessly frank. I come under none of those heads. I am myself. I live and ponder alone.\n\nAnd my Body feels consciously aloof and as a someway separate individual: with inner organs as eternal hopes, smooth skin as emotion and drops of blood as thoughts--little drops of sparkling red virile sweet blood for its thoughts.\n\nI so love my Body as it lives and breathes and moves about, with me and close to me. It is my so constant companion. It is an attractive girl, a human being of some charm. I love it for the priceless air it breathes and the long jewel-days of sunshine it has known: for the tiny wears and tears of its daily life--the rending of its magic tissues with each going-up-or-down-stairs, each crossing of a door-sill. I love it for that it must lie at last pale, pale and still--still--still--in its grave.\n\nI love my Body for its woman-complexities of sex. I love it for the lonely lyric poetry of its cell-adventures.\n\nI love my Body for this long journey of woe and loveliness which it goes, from Birthday to Death-day, in wilding passions of subtle nervousness: each day a day of bodily beauty and intolerableness and fear and utter mystery: because life is, and because I own a white smooth-skinned Body, and because the strange, strange Air of Everyday breathes on it--touches it--always!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "14 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Sincerity and despair", "text": "I am a true Artist, not as a writer but as a writing-person.\n\nI try to feel myself literarily a poet--finer-made than a god. But I fail as a poet-litterateur as I fail as a poet-person. A poet flies always on wings of fiery gold though it might be waywardly. But often I walk with my feet in odd gutters, and have some plaisance in them, and analyze their gutteriness absorbedly and own them as part of my portion.\n\n--poet or no poet, it is best to be myself. In heights and murks and widths and trivial horrors, myself--\n\nBut as an Artist I am in the true. As a painter of words and maker of paragraphs which picture my phases and emotions, and in my conscious feeling anent it, I realize the artist flair, the artist temper. It is not a literary but a personal art.\n\nI have what goes with all artist-matter--long periods of dry-rot when having nothing ripe to write I write nothing. My Artist-spirit proves itself, justifies itself in my times of stagnation and reaction. Out of it something human and sad and lustrous grows in me, something which is half worldly but awaits its ripe time of expression with someway-divine scorn.\n\nI once thought me destined to be a ‘writer’ in the ordinary sense. And many good people visioned a writing career for me. It has a vapid taste, just to recall it. My flawed life has that to felicitate upon--that I have not spent it in fat lumps of writing, magazine tales and sex-novels. In the days, and later, when my demi-vierge book made its success I was besought by publishers to write others--to go on, to reap and garner. I pushed all that away with a preoccupied hand, not as part and parcel of my wastrel living but in my assured Artist-temper. I should feel more true-to-form to earn my living by making linen roses in a shop, along with rows of pale women, than by my writing.\n\nMy writing is to me a precious thing--and a rare bird--and a Babylonish jade. It demands gold in exchange for itself. But though it is my talent it is not my living. It is too myself, like my earlobes and my throat, to commercialize by the day.\n\nBut I can not think of me as an Artist without thinking of me as a Liar. The two are someway related. I am an appalling, an encompassing Liar. I am a Liar by the clock. My life ticks out silent lies as my little clock ticks out seconds. It is a phase hard to put my finger on. I feel it on me the way I feel a headache. I write this book with seriousness and earnestness. It is all a mood of sincerity and despair. But except I give it some backgrounding of lies, though each thing in it is fair fact, I fail as an Artist.\n\nIt is strange about lies--any lies, all lies. They are muscularly stronger than truths. They come more readily to human tongues. They fit more easily into the games of this life. And in me they seem needful to my Artist mind.\n\nI mean not the lies I may tell but the lies I think.\n\nI mean not my falseness. That is a different thing, one I feel someway responsible for. But the thinking lies feel to be a heritage from ancient evil selves.\n\nI lie to myself, to the air around me--I blow lies into space from my quiet lips. And one half of me knows them for lies and the other half of me believes them.\n\nThose half-known lies, the need of the lies half-believed, are the realization of an essential Artist-spirit.\n\nThe oblique belief in them and the recognition of them as lies proclaim me to myself, as a writing-person: Liar and Artist."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "10 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "It’s not death", "text": "It’s not Death I fear, nor Life.\n\nI horridly fear something this side of Death but out-pacing Life a little: a nervousness in my Stomach--a very Muddy Street--a Lonely Hotel Room."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "22 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A human prerogative", "text": "It is a quiet deep of night. A bell has just tolled two.\n\nI am clothed in cool bedroom negligées and a softening sweetness of cold cream, from head to foot.\n\nI am tranquil for to-day I had a walk that made me feel Sincere and Safe.\n\nIt is a comforting feeling: it is like a beef-sandwich.\n\nIt was a long walk south-east of Butte along an outskirting road where I used often to walk when I was sixteen--a broad gray desert. It was the same sand and barrenness. It was bare and withered as if a giant coyote had picked its rocky ribs.\n\nThe day was windy and dusty. The sunshine was thick and sweet and heavy like floating honey. The dust that blew against the white of my neck was like ground glass.\n\nMy feet ached as I walked.\n\nMy shoes were Cuban-heeled thick-soled pumps of corded silk, a kind easy to walk in. But the same feet which once readily bore me seven miles along that road ache now at three. All of me ached as I walked along. I cursed desultorily with a smooth whispered flow of curses, because the circumstances seemed to demand it. But I loved the walk--even the more for my tired feet and my aching knees and my irking drooping shoulders and the hot glazed sand against my throat.\n\nMy Soul tasted realness in it.\n\nQuite close to me, in immense sad beauty, were the deep high heavy silent somber hills of Montana. To-day the nearer ones were a stately enchanted Blue: a Blue of all ages: a Blue of infinitude: a Blue with a feel of life and death in its Blueness. Above it the sky was not blue but a pale glimmering shimmering silver hung across with gray silk clouds soft as doves’ plumage.\n\nI sat on a flat rock and looked at all of it and at the desert around, and at my dusty shoes.\n\nAll of it felt overwhelmingly sincere: at one with the wide worn used earth.\n\nMy dusty shoes looked to be at one with it and could interpret it.\n\nI felt my shoes could claim their human prerogative of getting dusty in any of this world’s roads.\n\nIt gave me a feeling of human Sincerity: good-and-evil Safeness.\n\nIt is on me now, along with cold cream and strong memory of Desert and Sun and Blue.\n\nIt is as good as a beef-sandwich.\n\nBetter: I don’t like beef-sandwich."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "11 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The merciless beauty", "text": "Sometimes the dusk is full of fire.\n\nSome dusks I sit by my window looking out and hotly and coldly want a Lover: hotly with my Body and coldly with my Mind.\n\nA dusk has just gone. I sat looking out at it.\n\nA mist of dark cream tinged with heated violet came from nowhere and hung above the ground.\n\nSuddenly came on me a sense of bewildering mysterious beauty.\n\nIn it was a feel of rippling warmth that crept into my bone-and-flesh from forehead to heel, from temples to soles, from crown to toe-tips.\n\nIt crept slow and suffocating like magic chloroform.\n\nI leaned elbows on window-sill and chin on palms and sunk my gaze in the violet shades outside and straightway knew I wanted a Lover: not in delicate moonlit culmination like Juliet in her balcony: not denyingly like the timid young nun in her cloister assailed unaware by faint forbidden emotions.\n\nI wanted a Lover like the jungle leopard leaping through the Springtime covert at nightfall to find her mate.\n\nIt is a subtle and an obvious feeling, made of a merciless beauty.\n\nIt is the tired urge of sex-tissues and nerve-cells: positive, furious, fiery as the bloodiest sun.\n\nIt is the same which the heated leopard feels in her sharp immaculate lust. It is quite the same--but it could not move me as I sat alone loverless to the knitting of an eyebrow, to a change of posture, a movement of elbows on the window-sill or of palms beneath my chin. Nor could it, though the potential Lover had stood outside my window.\n\nFor any woman of any charm the world is full of Lovers: each and all to be had by the flutter of her finger, the droop of her white eyelids, the trembling of her pink-bowed lips. The world is full of them--facile Lovers, craven, potent and pinchbeck. And it’s that kind I want hotly with my Body, coldly with my Mind in dusks of rippling warmth--rippling, rippling warmth--\n\nI want the Lover as the leopard wants hers. But I’m not a leopard: instead, a woman-person of keen sentientness and wild wistful imagination. So I wouldn’t so much as crook a finger to call a Lover to me: a curious nervous inertia.\n\nIt’s only I want the Lover with frantic blind cosmic ardors inside me.\n\nI analyze it in my magic Mind and find I would call no Lover. I analyze farther and find I’d reject all but an impossible one-in-ten-thousand. But remains the desire, hot as live embers, cold as hail.\n\nSex is an odd attribute. It has been to me like a blest impediment and a celestial incumbrance and a radiant curse.--\n\nWhen I was seventeen I stood on a threshold and peered curiously into a dim-lit strange-scented Room.\n\nIt was unknown to me then. My mind alone bespoke it. As I stood at its doorway the air it wafted out touched my sense with only the lightest frayed-cobweb contact, unintelligible and unenlightening. I had lived an emptily alone girlhood. I was icily virginal.\n\nAt five-and-twenty I crossed the Room’s threshold. I breathed lightly the odd fragrance. I looked curiously around. I touched some amorous-looking grapes and some love-promising apples that lay about: I bit into one and burst a grape with my finger and thumb. I gathered a weak-petaled flower or two. I gauged the Room and its furnishments and was unthrilled by anything in it. Even bodily it left me unthrilled.\n\nThose two memory-mists do not keep me in the now-dusk and in the strength and terror and fire of top-most youth from wanting a sudden Lover with all that’s in my Body.\n\nLove has naught to do with it. Love is a flame-winged Bird. I know it. I know the values of my life and of me. I do not mistake tapers for torches, ducats for louis d’ors, vicarious nepenthe for dreamless death.\n\nIn dusk-moments my bone-and-flesh is all of me I’m sure of. It begins and ends in this earth. It answers the violent summonses of this earth and its dusks.\n\nIn the just-gone dusk I felt the prickling blood flow to my finger-ends. A flood-tide, blinding red, surged and seethed and bubbled and pounded at my heart.\n\n‘I want a Lover--some Lover’--I murmured to the shadows beyond my window.\n\nI grew breathless.\n\nThe spirit of my flesh rose like a wind-blown flame.\n\nA loud cry rang in my nerve-wilderness.\n\nThat moment the variant analysis which always rides with me stopped dead.\n\nThere came instead sheer feeling--the merciless beauty.\n\n--a man-person, maybe--the man of happy unanalytic brutality--to be suddenly there with me: to flash into my shadowy solitude like a lightning bolt and burst and break me.\n\n--a quarter-hour of exquisite wildness--restlessness, made of Star-flame and Lily-petal and Cloud-burst on Mountain-summits and Sea-waves purple in a Stormy Dawn--an intolerable hunger and ecstasy--\n\nBut just gone and I sit writing it in the pale cast of thought.\n\nBut breathlessly I recall the breathlessness of it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "22 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "My shoes", "text": "I love my Shoes.\n\nI love them because they so guard my feet.\n\nI walk many a mile along the stone pavements and into distant odd streets and on open roads at the outskirts of this Butte.\n\nAnd while I walk I think.\n\nI think things of a great many kinds--potent and magic and mad. The act of walking starts an engine in my sparkling infernal mind. And the weight and the sting and the hurt and the fascination of my walking thoughts bear down on my slim feet as they carry me along. And the hard-beaten world beneath them feels resentful and uncomplaisant to my soles.\n\nAnd then I look down at my Shoes with their trim tailored vamps and their walk-worthy soles and instantly my feet feel secure against evil, smartly protected from my thoughts and from the world’s surface: my thoughts which shoot down on them out of my devilish brain and the world-hardness beneath them.\n\nTo-day I was walking along the road that leads up the ever-wonderful Anaconda Hill--a place of stones and sand-wastes and hoists and scaffoldings and mines with ten thousand digging men thousands of feet down in their metallic bowels. Close by were melancholy mulberry-toned mountains at the north-east. They were tragic, triumphant, grief-stricken, terrifyingly beautiful. Purple clouds hung around them like mourning veils. I can’t look enough at those--it is as if there weren’t enough looking-power in my human gray eyes.\n\nPresently I came to a small open space as I walked, a toy desert. A toy desert is more like a desert than is a real one. The sand in it is grayer sand. The stones are abrupter. The sun is flatter-looking. The air is less willing to furnish breath to a human being. The best that could be said of this one is that it was intolerably desolate. I looked about and about it. And suddenly I was afraid. Afraid of many things: afraid of grief-stricken mountains: afraid of my life and of Me.\n\nI leaned against a yellow ledge of rock with a subtle sickening faintish feeling. ‘I am afraid,’ I said inside me, ‘of this world and this life, and of all things little and large--nerves and Christmas days and poetry: toy deserts and all. How can I cope with it--I alone?’\n\nThen I looked down at my Shoes of black soft dull leather and cloth, buttoned snugly around my ankles and with tough supple soles fit to take me to Jericho and back. Thus neatly armored I felt suddenly my blue-veined feet need fear nothing from sand and stone and hardness of ground. And if my feet are not afraid--my feet which bear weights of all-of-me--why should afraidness touch my spirit which is proud?\n\nThere will be always Shoes in the world: stout stylish serviceable boots, and pale delicate rat-skin pumps, and satin mule-slippers.\n\nAnd always I shall have Shoes: in toy deserts I shall have black strong snug-buttoned ones.\n\nI looked at them in this toy-desert and straightway I wasn’t afraid.\n\nIt has been often like that.\n\nSo I love my Shoes."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "19 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "An eerie quality", "text": "When I was Ten years old I played marbles ‘for keeps,’ smoked little pieces of rattan buggywhip in the hay-scented barn and slid ‘belly-buster’ down long winter hills on my sled. And I hammered and sawed ruinously with grownup tools, whistling happily. And I played with dolls absorbedly for hours on end.\n\nI was not boyish and not girlish.\n\nI was not childish except for an oddly hungry child-heart.\n\nI was myself.\n\nSo long ago and longer I consciously owned an eerie quality which toppled over the edge of my humanness.\n\nAnd still own it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "18 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A helliad", "text": "This noonday as I sat on the veranda two young lads stopped by the stone coping which borders this front yard, and conversed. One was eager-looking and about eleven years old. The other was perhaps thirteen and morose and he had a small rifle which he polished with a bit of waste, not lifting his gaze as they talked.\n\nSaid the younger boy: ‘Say-Frank, I could ’a’ had that old shot-gun off my dad if I’d ’a’ went after it to Rocker that time.’\n\n‘Like hell you could,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, you know that Winchester o’ Billy O’Rourke’s?--he made six bull’s-eyes and one inside ring with it day ’fore yesterday.’\n\n‘Like hell he did,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, Mexicans and Indians can get a guy ev’ry time with a long-distance rifle without taking aim through the sight.’\n\n‘Like hell they can,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, there’s a kid down on South Arizona that’s got a Colt automatic that’ll hit without him aiming at all.’\n\n‘Like hell there is,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, you know them little brass machine-guns the militia’s got?--the bores o’ them things ’re rifled just like this.’\n\n‘Like hell they are,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, my grandfather in Illinois ’s got a bullet in him he got at the battle o’ Fredericksburg in the Civil War.’\n\n‘Like hell he has,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, it costs a hundred-thousand dollars to make a Krupp gun and eighty dollars ev’ry time you fire it.’\n\n‘Like hell it does,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, it ain’t a felony to croak a burglar with a gun even if he’s only breakin’ into somebody else’s house.’\n\n‘Like hell it ain’t,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, my mother goes huntin’, too--she can shoot rabbits and ducks on the wing and once she got a deer with that big old .44 o’ my Uncle Walt’s.’\n\n‘Like hell she did,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank--listen, will you gimme your gun for my bicycle, both my catcher’s gloves and four dollars when I get paid?’\n\n‘Like hell I will,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank--listen, will you gimme it for my bicycle, my two catcher’s gloves, four dollars when I get paid and my shepherd pup?’\n\n‘Like hell I will,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my artificial snake?’\n\n‘Like hell,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my half o’ Ernest’s camera?’\n\n‘Like hell,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my last year’s shin-guards?’\n\n‘Like hell,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my this year’s shin-guards?’\n\n‘Like hell,’ said Frank.\n\n‘Say-Frank, come right down to it I don’t want a .22. If I get a gun this year it’ll be a .32.’\n\n‘Like he--’--\n\n* * * * *\n\nWhich point I felt to be the too-note of the helliad, so I rose and came into the house.\n\nI felt replete with rhythm and with a sense of surprising human attitudes remote from my own."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "5 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Swift go my days", "text": "Swift, Swift go my days.\n\nBy rights I think time should drag with me, for I am wasting my portion of life as I live it.\n\nBut my days pass Swift--Swift, Swift.\n\nThey come, they fly away--before I know.\n\nI’m thinking it is Tuesday: but while I’m thinking--Wednesday has come: and gone: and Thursday is rushing in. Tuesday, blue-and-gold or gray-and-silver, with its mornings and nights and bits of food and openings of doors and thinkings: Wednesday with the same equipment: Thursday the same.\n\nEach day comes and goes like a flash of filmed silvered garbled light.\n\nBut there is time in each for me to touch the enchanted Everydayness: time for the turbulent sly delight of tasting, smelling, feeling the eternal humors and romances in each small thing near me--my Clock, my Window, my Jar of Cold Cream, my Two Thumbs. There is time in each day for it to make me pay a wearing glimmering feverish homage to the mystic daily godhead.\n\nMy life exacts terrific homages from me.\n\nI am wearing out--frailly, tiredly, from a desolate uneasy love of living.\n\nIt is why my days go Swift when by rights time should drag leadenly in punishment for barbarous futileness.\n\nThere is not time-space enough in any of the days sufficient to love the virile green and the murderous red and the sweet pale surprising purple in the sunset above the west desert: nor space to love the smell of a sudden August rain: nor the flaming delicate Idea of the poet John Keats.\n\nWhile I’m starting to love each of those to its height of love-worthiness--the to-day is gone: and the to-morrow, which must see a new love-game started for each Thing, is come.\n\nBut while I say ‘is come’: it’s gone.\n\nSo Swift go my days--oh Swift, Swift!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "7 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "By the blood of dead Americans", "text": "Since I wrote the beginning of this there has come the war in Europe: a war full of suffering brave women and dead children: full of German greed and cruelty and stupidity and of French gameness and cheerfulness, French splendor of valor.\n\nIt has an effect of some kind on each person who reads so much as its ‘headlines.’\n\nIt has the effect on me of making me a jealously patriotic American.\n\nIt makes me think of Lexington and Gettysburg with an odd furious personal shame.\n\nWe are Americans not by accident but by the blood of dead Americans. But we assume it is by accident.\n\nWe lie down like a nation of bastards to let the pig-hearted Hun trample by proxy on our neck.\n\nIt was for America to declare war in the same hour the Lusitania passengers met murder.\n\nWe were not ‘too proud’ but afraid. Afraid and not ready.\n\nNot ready has no right thing to do with it.\n\nThey were not ready at Lexington.\n\nI long with some passion to exchange my two black dresses for two white ones with red crosses on the sleeves: to serve my country in a day of death and honor.\n\nIt too is all the time under my skin though I write along but in this flawed song of myself."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "19 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "To express me", "text": "I suppose I’m very lonely.\n\nIt is luck--luck from the stars--not to be beset by clusters of people, people who do their thinking outside their heads, ‘cheerful’ people, people who say ‘pardon me’: all the damning sorts scattered about obstructing one’s view of the horizons.\n\nBut for want of--other, other people--I am intensely lonely.\n\nWhen I was eighteen I thought I must be the most lonely creature in this world. I analyzed my life then as now and it by itself had set me apart. But I stood then as it’s given Youth to stand--on High Ground. I was strong to endure loneliness while viciously hating it. There was unaware a hope-colored bliss in my inexperience which companioned me. I felt it then without knowing I felt it. I can see that plainly now.\n\nNow also I see plainly and feel plainly that I stand on lower ground, at poorer vantage. As my bodily strength which was then robust is now slight. The metaphysic life-shadows reach me more easily. They have a feel of fatally shutting down, fatefully closing in. They are the mirages on the dun-colored worldly air near me of my own useless untoward selves. There is no more the hope-colored bliss.\n\nAt eighteen I said to me: ‘I’m lonely but some day I may be happily friendshiped and apprehended and it will be like paradise.’\n\nNow I say to me: ‘I’m lonely by fate and by nature and temperament. I’ve known some friendships of vivid alluringness and informingness--they await me now in the offing. And others. There is paradise in it--an odd sweet dubious paradise. But what’s the use--?’\n\nIt’s that what’s-the-use, born of the lower vantage-ground and the closing-in shadows, that chiefly makes me lonely--lonely to a desperateness and on through to a ruinous calm.\n\nIt is this metaphysic loneliness which breeds in me one constant reasonless restless urgent motif: to Express me: not of-the-past except desultorily, not of-the-future save indifferently: but of my low-toned, low-echoing now. Until I’ve Expressed me there’s no setting open the gates of my spirit to a passer-by, though the passer-by should be a poet-in-the-flesh, a god, an angel with a torch.\n\nFour-and-twenty turbulent moods may break over me in a day, or four-and-twenty passive ones, or four-and-twenty someway joyous ones. But like the theme in a fugue this loud tranquil recurrent need to Express me transcends them all.\n\nIt is a big voracious part-human bird of prey. Of it too I say what’s-the-use. But it is a need without a use, a need scornful of use. It springs unconceived, unsourced from inside me. It rises from the ashes of blightingest moods and beats its bruising strong wings against my face.\n\nIt says: ‘Know me, defer to me, Slim-woman. Serve me, follow me, gather-in all your answers for me. Do this though I undo you, though I rend you, tear you with my sharp teeth so like a wolf’s. When you’ve answered me I may let you go. Until then, turn to me. Tell me: tell me again and again. Utter yourself. Interpret. Unfold.’\n\nIt makes my life-space someway sweet, someway heartbreaking, someway frightful--strewn with dust of broken stars.\n\nI live long hours of nervous profound passionate self-communion. I discover strange lovely age-worn facets of my Soul. I discover the subtle panting Ego--the wonderful thing that lives and waits in its garbled radiance just beneath my skin.\n\nTo ask oneself and make answer out of oneself is the most delicious of this life’s mental delectations. I might have missed it but for those beating bruising wings against my face, now and years ago: for expressing breeds the last Expressions.\n\nI might have gone on through years and decades and lumps of months knowing at best a little of some rare person, a little less or more of another rare person, a little of a musician’s soul in a nocturne, a little of a dead poet’s splendors. But to Me and my own fine spirit-relationships to those things I could remain, but for my radiant flawed egotistic interpreting, eternally strange.\n\nBut for it I’d not have the wit to perceive the one human being in the world I may know with vitalness: my own Self. I should drop into my grave at last without a good-by to the glowing one who was locked just inside, whose hand I’d never clasped, whose sad prescient eyes I’d never looked in, who was then flitting out and on and away.\n\nIt is a being cruel and transfiguring and terrifying: terribly worth clasping close and breathing with.\n\nAnd some days it sleeps, sleeps like the dead: it is delicater than rose-vapors before the dawn: a sun-blown faëry thing.\n\nWhen it sleeps I’m left alone. Then comes a doubtful dreadful quiet, a hell of dumbness that only God could reach.\n\nIt is as if neither God nor I attempts to cope with it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "4 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Bastard lacy valentines", "text": "The thing I admire most is strength. The thing I most hate is Weakness, of each and every kind.\n\nAll the reassuring things in the world are in and of the strong deeds done in it. All the mischief and despair come from human Weakness.\n\nI would better strongly murder my foe than forgive him Weakly for my seeming advantage. I would be happier in my mind as a careful charwoman than as a loose-jointed poet. I would rather have a farthing’s value as a faithful concubine than no value as a slattern housewife.\n\nStrength repays itself with strength--and with magnificence.\n\nTruth is strength nearly always: and not always.\n\nTo cheat strongly in the life-game gets me more than does Weak easy honesty. By being a strong man Napoleon brought home the bacon. Being an honest one would have got him not one rasher of the bacon of his desire. The race is too ridden with ‘temperament’ to let truth be its prevailing force. But strength plows its scornful way through temperament like a steam-shovel. The bacon Napoleon brought home he took from other people, causing them misery. They were Weak and let him take it, or they were strong and got killed trying to keep it. To get killed trying to keep your bacon is to be even stronger than the Napoleon who lives and takes it from you. Those who sit still and let Napoleon get their bacon are fit only to be themselves made into bacon.\n\nTruth belongs with love, with friendship, with charity, with psychic lovingkindness: with all the altruistic graces and tendernesses.\n\nBut in the mere grinding livingness of things it is to be strong. I say to Me, ‘Mary MacLane, be strong: whether you’re living joyous on a hill or mournful in a valley, make shift to be strong.’\n\nIn which paragraphs I make an apologetic preamble to Me when about to dwell on my odd ironic element of Weakness. My Weakness is not an art nor a science nor a gift nor a trait but is a sort of ruinous trade touched with all of those, a trade at which I work and lose heavily from a viewpoint of personal economy.\n\nIn Atlanta-Georgia lives a man with whom I exchange semi-occasional letters. He is thirty-nine and clever and what is called a business man. He is a business man not only by circumstance but by nature. At a glance one would picture him in the setting of an office in a steel-and-brick building with a roll-top desk, a swivel chair, a cabinet full of files, a stenographer with an unregenerate vocabulary, and stationery neatly engraved with his name, his business, his cable address and his telephone number. The look of the neat letterhead and the fibrous feel of the bond paper give one the idea that whoever went into a business venture with him would come out of it disadvantageously.\n\nAfter another glance at himself one would infer that his leisure hours might be fancifully spent. In hours of ease some business men follow baseball, others golf, ‘tired’ ones musical comedy. Others take up curio collecting or some personal phantasm. In the latter category is my acquaintance of Atlanta. He affects Mary MacLane and musings of her in his leisure hours. But what I am to him does not concern nor much interest me. What he is to me concerns me, for he--his letters--are a present source of my elaborated Weakness.\n\nI feel a wave of conscious Weakness washing over me as I write about it. His letters make a soft buffer, a foolish pretty window, a tinted veil between me and my too-harsh actualities.\n\nI met him when I lived in New York. He had read the book I wrote in the early nineteen-hundreds and at meeting me he conceived a thinly insistent admiration which someway went to his head. He has at intervals since then written me letters full of charmed and salubrious flattery and of appreciation and praise for traits and gifts and qualities which I do not possess. They appeal and cater remarkably to my vanity--and are pleasant and unreal and vain and fatuous and fond and piquant.\n\nHe is a clever man and does not make love to me. A butcher’s-boy may write love-letters--and I’d prefer those of a butcher’s-boy to those of a business man: they would be more sincere and less hopelessly discreet. But this business man is discerning and intuitive and writes me no love. His wife--a business man always has a wife--could not rationally object to what is in the letters, though she would irrationally and naturally object to the letters themselves. She is unloving and unloved--they always are--but whatever may be her caste (I know only that she is tall and blonde and named Bertha) she doubtless would find something superfluous in the idea of her husband’s letters to me.\n\nA letter comes from him in Georgia after I have written him a brief disquieting one with a latent human appeal in it to make him think the chief thing I need in life is his appreciation, his attitude toward me, to brace my spirit. Then his comes, written in his small slanting commercial hand. It is arresting from any angle and well thought, well couched.\n\nIn it he tells me that my brain, scintillantly brilliant though it is, needs the dim twilights of other brains such as his to catch the sparks it throws off.\n\nWhich is a lie. My brain is not scintillantly brilliant and it ‘needs’ nothing. But the lie is agreeable to read. There is a gentle caressingness in its untruth which feels someway soothinger than any flattering fact.\n\nAnd he tells me my chief attraction as an individual is my ability accurately to gauge another individual and to breathe myself graciously out to it and upon it while pretending to be immersed in my own ego.\n\nWhich is another lie. Immersed in my own ego is never a pretense with me, and I have not gauged--in the sense of weighing and measuring--another individuality except to hate it. But it is piquantly restful to hear that I am thus benign.\n\nAnd he tells me that though several years have passed since he and I took leave of one another he has never forgotten that last parting because it was like the passing of a little weir-woman who brushed him lightly with her garments as she went.\n\nWhich is another lie. My association with him was in brief meetings at hectic studio tea-fights and two noisy dinners at Churchill’s, at all of which I frowned impatiently at his tiresome conversation. And his leave-taking with me consisted in his sharpening a lead-pencil--beautifully he sharpened it--for me to write a telegram with. It was not until this correspondence that we established an unreliable intimacy. But to be told I seemed a weir-woman to a hard-headed business man who could doubtless cheat a client out of four thousand dollars easily in a half-day’s maneuvering is oddly inspiriting.\n\nAnd he tells me he is highly privileged to be permitted to gaze in at the mezzo-tinted windows of my soul, which are surely curtained against the passing proletariat.\n\nWhich is another lie. He has never remotely glimpsed my tired Soul in the firmly false little letters I’ve written him. As to its being a privilege if he had: it is the proletariat, it so happens, who have first chance at those windows, which are not mezzo-tinted but made of the plainest of plain glass. But the conceit tastes mellow and naïf and bromidic and appetizing to me, like cream and raspberries in July.\n\nAnd he tells me the most delightful thing in the world would be to live near me and have a season of daily meetings--meetings of astral selves upon a ‘higher plane’ whereon we should exchange those flowers and fruits of the spirit which grow not from the soils but from the esoteric essences of life:--that sort of thing.\n\nWhich is another lie. No possible man (except a Poet whom I loved--or perhaps a scientist--) could find me delightful for more than two consecutive meetings--I develop something like temper--and I care for no higher planes except in airships. As for esoterics--I would fainer exchange musings anent over-shoes than over-souls. And my spirit bears in fertile earthy soil chiefly thistles from which men gather no figs. But it gives me a warmish feeling, similar to a hot-water bottle between my shoulders on a winter night, to read that picturesque palaver written to me in my slim scorn by him in his springy swivel chair.\n\nThus it goes. His letters are made all of softest quaintest lies which I know to be lies the moment my gray gaze falls on them. All his premises in regard to me and his deductions from them are roundly lightly mistaken. But I like that fluent flattery the more because it is so false. I am too vain a creature to want to cope often with truths even though they might be uplifting self-lauding truths. My vain peculiar Weakness demands as well semi-occasional collations of creamed lies upon which it feeds like a sleek cat on creamed fish. My humor enters into it, in no obvious way but eerily like a gay ghost. My humor is a strong influence in me. It is stronger than my pride and anger and fear and caution and reverence and self-love--stronger than most things I own.\n\nAnd it’s for reasons of pastime and vanity and oblique humor I let letters from the business man come, though not often, into my solitudes. And I spend hours of inert time-waste conning his fanciful ideas. And the letters I write him in reply, though brief and impersonal and done in my best false manner, consume a surprising lot of time and mental and physical force to write. It is the Weakness in it which is so devouring: it eats me hungrily and lingers about like a buzzard, picking my bones.\n\nA spinelessly Weak game. I hate its Weakness more than I like its pleasant futility. I hate it and myself in it all the time I’m dwelling on it. I hate it as I’d hate a little drug habit fastened on my nerves.\n\nIts influence is the same but more insidious than a drug would be, more demoralizing. As feeling fear makes one afraid, feeling more fear makes one more afraid.\n\nStill once in a month, once in a two-month, I feel the hankering itch to be applauded for second-rate qualities I do not own, and I give way to it: in a particularly Weak way, after my sanest self has reduced it analytically to shreds, and after saying bosh! with all my selves.\n\nAfter telling Me too that it is a common-tasting game. Life is a strange music-clangor of gold bells, some silent, some far-echoing. And the common-tasting thing cracks a bell-edge.\n\nThen briskly I answer the last letter from Atlanta-Georgia and soon there comes a fresh sheaf of smooth velvetish lies to pad my way.\n\nThere may come no more if this I write now should find its way to Atlanta-Georgia. Or if fate or Bertha should intervene.\n\nBut always I know Weakness of me will find ways to work at its losing trade.\n\nIt is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature--like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "19 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Sweet fine sweatings of blood", "text": "Merely from the view-point of outward intellect this book of myself is oddly difficult to write.\n\nMy most-loved thing to do and my hardest thing to do is to write.\n\nIt is hard to catch and hold with mental fingers one’s own emotions and then doubly hard to write them. A feeling is something without the words and without even the thought. To put it into the thought and then into the words is a minuter task than would be the translating of a François-Villon poem into Choctaw.\n\nIt’s a knowing person who realizes her own emotions and a knowinger who recognizes what is what, who is who, which is which among them. I look inward at Me and I see an emotion of World-Weariness and want to write it. I write it as nearly as I can. But when I have done--it’s not World-Weariness that I wrote but its twin-sister, Boredom-of-the-Moment, which happened to be next the other when I looked. I am glad to have transcribed Boredom-of-the-Moment. It is the finer and thinner and more elusive of the two. But how and why did I fail of World-Weariness?\n\nBut sometime when I aim at Fear or Resentment or Surprise it may be World-Weariness I’ll bring down unexpectedly with a clean wing-shot.\n\nWhen I set out to write the Look-in-my-Eyes it may be the Feel-of-my-Fingers that comes out in my round writing. Another time I think I’m writing my Bad-Tooth: until I get it written when it turns out to be my little Eye-Wrinkles.\n\nHaving failed of the thought often I fail of the words. When I have a particularly M.-Mac-Lane thought to express I review the top tier of my vocabulary of words to find proper ones for it. They are all very nice words in that top-tier--neatly washed and dressed and hair-brushed and tidied-up, like the children in a small private school: words like Necessary and Irresolute and Crockery and Inconvenience and Broth and Apprise: good words and useful if one’s thought is radical or risky and wants conserving. I call some of them to me and question them and consider them and ponder a bit, and decide they will none of them suit. Then I go to the bottom tier, the unkemptest of words in the untidiest attire: words like Traipse and Nab and Glim and Hennery and Chape and Plash. And I at once reject those as too carelessly bred for my terse thoughts to associate with. (But for my uncombed ungroomed grimy-faced thoughts I turn to them.) Then I glance over a tier of mysterious words, spruce but with indefinable vagabond faces: such as Whelk and Mauger and Frush and Gnurl and Yare and Hyaline. They are expressive but of a kind it’s well to use with caution, the kind that may trip up thoughts that would make them their medium and lead to slips ’twixt cups and lips. So I dismiss them with a mental reservation of one or two to use if I fail to find right ones among the less mysterious. Then I turn to a tier that represents the virile middle-class in words, the lower-case words, the mob and riot words, the words for poets and anarchists and prophets: such as Adroit and Nightingale and Gallows and Gutter and Woman and Madrigal and Death. And I say, ‘Without doubt here are my words.’ But I use discretion. I know that tier of words to be of the nature of bombs, of strychnine, of a dynamic force resistible against all human and wordly substance. They also must be used cautiously and with a sparing hand. With caution one can handle a bomb, and sparingly one can eat strychnine, and one can control any dynamic force by studying its tendencies and keeping out of its direct road. It behooves one to heed those conditions in broaching the countermining counter-irritant words if one would avoid blowing oneself analytically broadcast.\n\nSo I may have found the right sort of words and measured their possibilities and pitfalls. But again: it’s a nerve-racking task to choose out one word from seven, one from five, one from two. I see two words which may be the only proper ones out of ten thousand to bear my thought. The two may be Echo and After-glow, each an unacknowledged half-sister to the other: meaning respectively something living and growing and vibrant in my spirit-ears, and fading and dying and radiant before my spirit-eyes. But because my spirit-ears may glow bright and hot from what they heard, or my spirit-eyes may seem to themselves to gaze a moment at a soundless sound--an Unheard Melody of Keats,--I miss the raylike distinction and I write After-glow when my true word was Echo.\n\nBut another time I write Echo perfectly and masterfully to my own delight: having meant After-glow.\n\nSo it is. There’s no plain sailing on this analytic sea. And if there were it would be not worth while. I want nothing, nothing, nothing that comes easily. What comes easily I distrust, be it love or language. It afterward proves dead-sea fruit. What I suffer to get I know to be life-food even if it drugs or pains or poisons me. It is one lesson I have learned.\n\nWithout doubt it is so with everybody, all around. One sees only surfaces, husks. Anyone looking casually at this Me sitting writing might say, ‘How easily and smoothly and well she writes. How kind of God to give her so light a task in life. How complacently go her working hours.’ And I looking casually at--oh--Miss Lily Walker singing and swaying and glancing sideways in a gorgeous Broadway chorus--I might say, ‘How easy a task in life has that brainless gazelle. To work with her body and not even with the sweats and sinews of it like a scrub-woman, and not with the facile shames of it like a lorette, but with the grace and suppleness and beauty and suggestions of it, aided by a soprano throat and a soprano face--with only the effort it wants to fling it all over footlights. And that pastime gets her her livelihood.’\n\nBut whoever marks me writing as one doing an easy task because I write along rapidly enough considers nothing of my mental travail for the thought, my blind grope for the language, my little nervous anguish of choice among the double-edged and triple-pronged words: and the neat concise failure of the result.\n\nAnd no, I do not thus comment on Miss Lily Walker. I have an appreciative pleasure in her charm and suppleness and bird-and-butterfly prettiness. But after a bit of contemplation and analysis of her surface I deduce the unconscious struggle it may be for Miss Lily Walker to be supple on nights when she does not feel supple, the thin agony of being sweet when she does not feel sweet, the neurotic torture of being seductive regularly--by the night: the more that perchance the struggle always is unconscious. Her brain being required in her body it’s to be assumed there’s none in her head. But I can deduce a nervous red heart beating illogically somewhere in her being protesting dumbly sometimes against one irking item, sometimes against another, sometimes against all the items in Miss Lily Walker’s scheme of life, but beating and beating on, like a little automatic drum wound up tight and tossed into a maelstrom to beat itself out.\n\nI’d like--like with breathless eagerness--to read the analyzed being just beneath Miss Lily Walker’s skin.\n\nEverybody--every human being--is wildly Real: radiant and desolate.--\n\nWith no amount of temperamental struggling could Miss Lily Walker analyze a psychic emotion of her own and then find the right word-combination to write it in.\n\nWith no conceivable effort of mine could I manage to be supple when I do not feel supple.\n\nSo Miss Lily Walker and I are quits at this game.\n\nIt totals up evenly, all ways around.\n\nNobody gets through one Real day--though it be a dayful of Real lies--without a demoniacal struggle of soul or a heavy blow on the personal solar plexus.\n\nAnd I make not even the intellect side of this book, which is a Realness to me, without sweet fine sweatings of blood."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "26 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Instinct--a ‘first law’", "text": "I long to do a Murder.\n\nDespite my futile way-of-life and my rotting destroying half-acquiescence in it I have a furious positive Murder in me.\n\nOne near me in my daily life injures me and goes on injuring me in a way which is scourging and malicious and intensely petty. There is in it helpless humiliation for me--me self-loving, proud and determinedly unsuppliant--and it makes maddening Murder rise in me.\n\nI don’t know why I do not do the Murder. I have nothing to lose by paying the law-penalty: nothing but my life, and my life is stripped bare--and was always barren by God’s decree--of all that makes a life sacred or lovely or precious. For long years and years, since child-days, I have been lost.\n\nI don’t know why I do not do the Murder: except that I think of it and brood over it and turn it round and round smoulderingly in my Mind. From no choice. I have tried to push the feeling away as a common thing beneath me. It is beneath me, for I am not little but someway big. But my Mind will take its toll of all that confronts me.\n\nThe humiliation and the helplessness to combat being humiliated in me who keep a casual proudness toward people is like a secret hot sword thrust, and kept freshly thrust, in my flesh. It makes me wild to do the Murder. But it makes me brood over it till the red act is lost in red brooding.\n\nThere come also thinkings.\n\nMurder, any Murder, is in its essence cowardly, a slinking meanness. And I am not cowardly and I am not mean. I am above malice and retaliation--all such impoverished impoverishing emotions. A shrug of my shoulders and they are satisfied. The impulse to hit back after a bitter wound is not of vengeance. It is instinct--a ‘first law.’ But Murder is self-accusingly cowardly and sneakingly human. I can’t get away from that. To take away a person’s life is like setting fire to his house--an officiously stooping act. It’s for me to live my life in aloof self-sufficience. No human malice should reach me in it. Then it’s not for me to reach out of it and stain my good fingers with unpleasant sticky blood. I am always in a prison of radiance and gloom.\n\nBut the mere habit of being a human being is breakingly insistent--no matter how many or how few frocks one owns. Neither of my two dresses is a protection against humiliation. A thin black serge dress gives me to myself a melancholy cold inert air: but beneath the smooth-fitting breast of it comes too often a throbbing frightful to feel, frightful to know, made of fierce petty anger and abasing hurt. I hide it and me in my room and twist my hands together and walk my floor, and a hurricane of helpless bitter trifling woe shakes and wrenches me. Then Murder enters me.\n\nWhat humiliates me is an obvious common thing that to any human one would mean hurt and more hurt. Though I am determinedly brave I am sensitive.\n\nI do not write itself because this is the book of me and not of people.\n\nIt is a slight, a poor and vivid cruelness. There is the tie of blood in it which in all ways--from a deep heritage--I respect: and it rubs an added stinging poison in the wound.\n\nIt is an injury I do not deserve. What I deserve I accept. What I do not deserve pressed on me to humiliate me makes Murder in me. Regardless of the other one--\n\n--it would be simpler and finer for me to do that Murder than to keep it in me. So many times in a week the trembling smothering longing to do that Murder beats, beats in my thin breast. To be so owned by a thing so small:--it is grief and despair and fury and wild nervous intolerableness. It strains my flesh--it wrenches my pulse--it blinds my eyes--it fills my throat--\n\n--it would be a simpler and finer thing to do any Murder than to feel, even once, the strangling damnedness rising, rising at my throat--"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "3 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Loose twos", "text": "I take it for granted God knows all about me.\n\nIf God should read this it would not be news to him.\n\nBut his knowledge of me is not immediate knowledge nor immediately interesting to him. He knows my Twos-and-Twos but he does not make Fours of them.\n\nI am formed of loose Twos which wait for God to make them Fours.\n\nI can not do it myself. When I’ve tried the added Twos come out threes, seventies, nines, twelves--all the mysterious numbers. Never Fours.\n\nLong ago I decided not to try but to wait for God.\n\nI juggle with temperamental and psychic Twos and experiment in hysteric additions.\n\nBut it’s no good my trying to make Fours.\n\nIf God does not take it up I shall be eternal Twos.\n\nAnd I seem not greatly to care: whenever that comes home to me I merely light a carefree cigarette."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "14 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Knitting or plaiting straw", "text": "The things I know are jumbled and tangled into an indescribable heap inside me.\n\nThe things I Don’t Know are separated and ranged of their own volition in long orderly rows in my conscious mentality.\n\nThe things I know glow with tints and gleams and will-o’-wisp lights and primal colors and waveringly with the blinding gold-purple lightnings of all-Time.\n\nThe things I Don’t Know glow--each one separately--with a small precise lantern-brightness of its own.\n\nAlso in my wide background are things I don’t know and am unaware of it: the mass of my luminous Ignorance--it shines with an earthy phosphorescence.\n\nWhen I look at the things I know I get an undetailed perspective of me like a bird’s-eye view of London.\n\nWhen I look at neat formal rows of things I Don’t Know I have a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw.\n\nI reckon up and count up and check up lists of big and little things I Don’t Know--like this, rapidly:\n\nI Don’t Know what ink is made of, nor how to fire a Maxim gun: I don’t know how to make a will: I don’t know how to cook a prairie-chicken, nor what to feed a pet weasel, nor who invented the snarling-iron, nor what it is.\n\nI Don’t Know what food people eat in the Himalaya Mountains, nor how Lord Cornwallis felt when he surrendered: I don’t know the color of a chicken’s gizzard, nor of sand, nor of fish-scales, nor of mice: I don’t know whether an English cabinet minister needs strength of mind or strength of will, or both, or neither.\n\nI Don’t Know how I hurt the true heart of my friend: I don’t know astronomy nor solid geometry: I don’t know what I think with: I don’t know what ooze leather is, nor who pitched for the Tigers in nineteen-nine.\n\nI Don’t Know a good horse from a bad horse: I don’t know why a bat sleeps head downward, nor what wasps live on: I don’t know how to open oysters, nor how to milk a cow: I don’t know the Latin for ‘whiskey.’\n\nI Don’t Know whether friendship is a selfish or an unselfish thing, nor who discovered the medlar apple: I don’t know what is a jab, fistically speaking, nor a punch, nor a hook, nor a wallop, nor the fighting weight of Packey McFarland: I don’t know whether a moth ‘marries’ or whether her eggs are impregnated like a fish’s: I don’t know why a clasp knife is called a jack knife, nor what to do for an aching foot.\n\nI Don’t Know how glass is blown: I don’t know whether coal is vegetable or mineral: I don’t know the chemical composition of the sunset vapors, nor how to play euchre: I don’t know how many guns an armored cruiser carries, nor whether a gorilla meditates: I don’t know whether I hate or greatly admire Catherine and Marie de Medici: I don’t know a winch from a windlass.\n\nI Don’t Know where is the cinnamon bear’s native haunt: I don’t know how flint is mined, nor if wire is made of steel: I don’t know who was the better man--William Wordsworth or the Duke of Wellington: I don’t know the advantages of tariff revision downward: I don’t know where ex-President Taft will go when he dies.\n\nI Don’t Know whether I feel more comfortable with or without my stays: I don’t know the origin of the word ‘dogged’: I don’t know whether a ‘full house’ is better than ‘two pairs,’ nor whether a right merry heart to-day is better than a wrong contented mind to-morrow: I don’t know whether rabbit-pie is made of cats in Paris, nor how many sails has a sloop: I don’t know what makes a dead body rot.\n\nI Don’t Know how to sharpen a carving knife, nor how to roll a cigarette: I don’t know the real English meaning of the French noun ‘élancement’: I don’t know whether my sex is a matter of my genital organs or of my mental inwards: I don’t know how to determine the contents of a circle in square inches, nor how to pronounce ‘zebra.’\n\nI Don’t Know whether Edgar Allan Poe is big or little: I don’t know how many soldiers fell at Shiloh: I don’t know whether temperament or nature or circumstance makes one woman a happy kindhearted whore and another an unhappy cruel-hearted nun: I don’t know how to grow artichokes: I don’t know what brimstone is, nor how to play the accordion: I don’t know what quality in me forms my handwriting.\n\nI Don’t Know what-like was my Soul in the Stone Age: I don’t know whether cheese is good or bad for my health: I don’t know what becomes of discarded hairpins, nor a tooth-brush’s ultimate destiny: I don’t know the ‘Fra Diavolo’ opera, nor whether anyone ever uses the word ‘thwack.’\n\nI Don’t Know whether my heart breaks from within or without: I don’t know whether ‘good old Marie Lloyd’ of the London ‘halls’ has a brain like G. K. Chesterton or a dexterous individuality like a juggler: I don’t know whether I feel spiritual bliss in my knees or in my spirit: I don’t know why I breathe and go on breathing.\n\nI Don’t Know what became of the ten lost tribes of Israel: I don’t know how to say how-do-you-do to a king: I don’t know the exact meaning of my terror and despair: I don’t know why I love--why I ever love--\n\nI Don’t Know whether laws of chance govern a spinning roulette wheel and ivory ball or whether chance is beyond law: I don’t know what kind of missile a Krupp gun shoots: I don’t know how a ground-and-lofty tumbler turns a triple air-summersault: I don’t know whether I really am the way I look in the mirror: I don’t know whether the Russian language has Romanic roots: I don’t know what is the wild power in poetry.\n\nI Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.\n\nI Don’t Know what makes each day a Day of dark Gold and life mournfully precious: I don’t know where is God: I don’t know how they make tea in Ireland: I don’t know how to pronounce the word ‘girl’: I don’t know how to make lace: I don’t know whether I hear a sound or feel it, nor why a spool of thread looks exactly like a Spool of Thread.\n\nI Don’t Know--I Don’t Know--I Don’t Know, rapidly, to the end of the mystic common-place infinitudes.\n\n--those give me a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw--"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "21 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A life-long lonely word", "text": "Fleeting times I wonder if it is my defect or others’ that no human family tie holds and warms me.\n\nThere is none. I think about it with wistfulness.\n\nThe only tie-of-blood feeling that clings to me is of my warming and keeping-alive. And it is very feeble. It grows more feeble.\n\nIt is a trivial matter as I look at it universally.\n\nBut as I look at it earthlily: there would be an abnormalness, a lostness in one when the mother who bore her got from it at best but a small cool dislike.\n\nIt makes me feel humanly lost.\n\n‘Lost’ is the shuddering life-long lonely word that brushes against me some nights and noons."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "25 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Their voices", "text": "Every day at half-past ten and half-past two I hear the high shrill sweet choric Voices of hundreds of children shaking the thin clear air.\n\nA public school is but a block from here. The children rush out of it, a hilarious noisy crowd, for a few mid-morning and mid-afternoon minutes. So those minutes, from hearing their Voices day after day, and day after day, have become lyric to my inner-listening.\n\nTheir Voices stir me, rouse me, speak to me with old very joyous, very woful meanings.\n\nThe children fairly leap out of the school-building through doors and down fire-escape stairways. And their Voices are at once hurled skyward, clamorous and chaotic.\n\nThe Sound they make is a roundly common sound yet ‘winged.’ It is an untrammeled Sound, uncultivated, only a little civilized.\n\nIt is world-music.\n\nIn it is the note beyond culture, higher than civilization, and older. It is brave as voices of the shrilling winds and warmer, viriler. It is liltinger than bird-songs and lustier than roarings of mountain cataracts.\n\nMusic of the world!--\n\nA little door inside me opens to those Voices.\n\nMy little door opens at the first shriek of the first child out of doors, and I hear not only the hundreds of vivid piercing Voices but more--their far-off echoes.\n\nThey are the Voices of children, children light-held in crude cold innocence. The eyes of the children are clear--their impulses and instincts rule their little lives. They are yet untouched by the tiredness and terror and shame and sorrow of being human beings.\n\nSo the Sound of their Voices sweeps out resistless and regardless as the sea or the sun which makes nothing of its own strength or weakness. And through my little spirit-door I hear them, the poignant common little sweet Voices, echoing, flying away, farther and farther: along the roads: over plains and hills: through valleys long worldly distances from here: through streets: through stone buildings and dingy courts: through big rich houses: through homes of comfort and homes of misery and homes of desolate smugness: into lifeless social foyers: into learned places: into law-courts and cabinet-rooms of nations: into graveyards and churches and down into dead-vaults: into theatres: into clinics: into shops: into factories: into dives and stews and brothels and at lustful doorsteps: into hotels and on sport-courses: into market-places and across battle-fields, round monuments and in towers and in forts and in prisons and in dungeons:--there along fly their Voices.\n\nIt is a brave, brave Sound, and an insistent: nothing stops it.\n\nIt is triumph.\n\nThe noise of the noisiest battle dies away in time. The pounding of ocean-surf on the rocks and of electric thunder in the clouds are lasting only with this earth. But brave wild Voices of children fly on and on, outlasting a million earths, silencing aeons of thunder, floating strongly back of the stars. The voices of men--wizards, monks, artisans, thieves--echo no farther than their talking conceits: even of poets except as they catch up into their sonance something to interpret a cool gay clamor of child-Voices. The voices of women--singing women, lovely women, angelic honest women--die with their bodies: even of mothers of the children except as they follow with their own echo, by dream and shadow, the thronging child-Voices as they go.\n\nFor the Sound of the child-Voices is more potent than wizards’--it is not cramped into thought-forms: more devotional than monks’ because super-conscious; more menacing than thieves’ because absolute. And it echoes, echoes, echoes in the market-place full-tongued, ringing, rising like the northern gale when all the other voices are long dead-silenced: and after.\n\nMusic of the world.\n\nThis moment I hear it for it is half-after two of a bright gold day. The air is emotional, nectareal, and mellow and yellow and hot-sparkling. The Voices pierce it like a storm of fine steel arrows. I at once set open my spirit-door and through it come the sweet shrill chorus and the marvel echo beginning and swelling and starting away. It wakes vision so that I see--quick, evil, terribly human, in the dazzlingest daytime colors--all those Places where the Voices go.\n\nI go to a window and watch the children running about beneath the high tide of their Voices. And they and the school-building and the streets and stone walls show in duller colors than the Places where their Echo goes.\n\n--small girls with clipped hair and bloused cotton frocks, taller girls throwing a basket-ball, thin-legged little girls playing hop-scotch, groups of varied sizes with rainbow ribbons in their hair, confused masses of knitted sweaters and fat white-stockinged legs and shiny leather belts and ankle-strapped shoes, and little young shoulders and knees and waistlines--restless and kaleidoscopic--\n\n--and confused boy-groups--little fellows in suits misnamed Oliver-Twist, larger boys of serge-Norfolk persuasion, types of the generic knickerbocker at once motley and monotonous--all with the strong sturdy calves of their legs clad in a time-honored kind of black ribbed stockings, all with the same breed of ties and collars and short-cropped hair, all with the tacit air of confessing themselves the most serenely cruel of all animals--\n\nA careless conscienceless happy mob.\n\nIt is the Sound of their Voices that invests them with the terrifying Power, the long world-sweeping Force as of spirit and matter merged, the human radioactivity not evil and not good, stronger than all evil and all good.\n\nThose children I look at must cease to be children, and must lose their Voices and grow into monks and thieves and singing women--must turn into persons--‘Romans, countrymen and lovers.’\n\nBut will come after those another chorus: the same chorus: the same Voices.\n\nThe brief yellow mellow minutes have passed and the last shout has been silenced and the hundreds of children, Rainbow Hair-Ribbons and Black Ribbed Legs, are again gathered into the McKinley School.\n\nAnd my little door is shut again: that door opens but for those Voices.\n\nThe Voices: their echo flying everywhere flies here into my still room: and it stirs me, rouses me, speaks to me with the old joyous woe.\n\nMusic of the world."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "21 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "My damns", "text": "I bear the detailed infliction of being a person with a tired mixture of patience and indifference and scorn.\n\nI say on Monday, Damn the ache in my left foot: on Tuesday, Damn that rattling window--I hate it: on Wednesday, Damn this yellow garter--it’s too tight: on Thursday, Damn my futile life: on Friday, Damn the solitude: on Saturday, Damn these thoughts: on Sunday, Damn my two dresses.\n\nBut I pronounce each day’s Damn in a half-perfunctory half-preoccupied tone, more from duty and fitness than from conviction. I intently mean each Damn, but the scornful indifferent patience which is my spirit-essence leavens each one. I swear at my life’s perversities with only a fatigued contempt due partly to bodily fragileness but mostly to a cold continently reckless mood which is clasped on me like a strong stupefied devil-fish. In this mood I should murmur the same gelded Damn if I found myself penniless and foodless in strange streets: if I became suddenly deaf: if my Body were being lashed with whips or raped by a Mexican bandit. I should murmur the same worn Damn if I were this moment on a gallows with the rope around my neck and life were dearly madly precious.\n\nI mark that with my musing regrets. I remember in the strong young furies of eighteen each new day of my life was filled with passionate poetic blasphemy, protests and rebellions of youth. Those were not tired, not acquiescent, not indifferent to slings-and-arrows, but firey-blooded quick-pulsed breathless brave young Damns.\n\nThere is splendor in being brave in a fighting attitude, but in being brave through indifference there is no splendor.\n\nBut it is only toward calamity and adversity and worldly untowardness that I feel indifferent. Fighting blood is stirred in me if not against the hated things then for the loved things. I could fight and I could die, and love it, to save poet-lusters, poet-fineness, poet-beauty from the world’s flat griefs. In that, which I feel warm and real and sparkling in my blood, in some splendor for me.\n\n--and also I could die for my country: and there is fighting hatred stirred in me against its foes--\n\nBut in poetry there is nothing that evokes a lusty curse against its vulgar adversaries. Poetry floats too high upon its dazzling wings. I get delicately drunk from watching it till I can see the wings’ Gold Shadow touch its foes and magically split them into dust-atoms.\n\nSo then the morale of my Damns remains perfunctory.\n\nBut they are apt and useful. They fit into the nervous rhythms of my life. They mark time in my spirit’s flawed action. I begin each day with a Damn of sorts. I end each day with a Damn of sorts. At midday sometimes it’s, ‘Damn the terrifying ignorance of people.’ In the dusk a deep-felt Damn of the blood. In the night another. And at my late eating time a negligible Damn.\n\nA wonderful word, Damn. It means enough and not too much. It means everything in life, and roundly nothing.\n\nWithout Damn my day would lack tone. Damn richly justifies each pronouncement of itself in word-value, substance-value and musical resonance. It harms nobody and it helps me. It destroys nothing and it strengthens me. It damages my annoyances and mends me somewhat.\n\nBut--perfunctory, desultory, tiredly insolent, it would be thrilling to think the hot fire would sometime be back in my Damns. Better that than Youth’s faith in my dreams. Better that than the jeune-fille beauty in my hair. Better than even Youth’s ichor in my veins: Youth’s fire in my Damns--\n\nBut there is dearness in this mood, which is indifferent and scornful and slightingly patient, though it wants splendor. Let my Damns be always brave, always contemptuous of disaster to me, and they will be first-water value though their kind alter never-so."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "11 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "To God, care of the whistling winds", "text": "This morning came a letter from a half-forgot friend in London. She is in vaudeville and has been booked for two months in the Music Halls. Her letter is of a tenor productive of a letter in turn. But I am somehow not free to write letters to friends while I’m living in my two plain dresses. So I wrote this letter to God instead:\n\n19th November.\n\nDear God:\n\nI know you won’t answer this letter. I’m not sure you will get it. But I have the feeling to write you a letter, though it should only blow down the whistling winds.\n\nI haven’t a thing to ask of you: no prayer to make. I am not suppliant nor humble nor contrite. Nor would I justify myself as a person in your eyes. I scorn to try to justify myself. What I am I am. If I am a bad actor I take the results of it without plaint. I comment on it--why not?--since cats may look at kings and each person inherits four-and-twenty hours a day. But I am bewildered and distraught and sad.\n\nThe best you do for me, God, when I think of you--you personally--is to make me bewildered and distraught and sad.\n\nBut I’ve imagined I could put myself to you as a proposition to take or to leave as you like: on my terms since I do not know yours.\n\nThere are some verses--the Rubaiyat--in which you are upbraided as if you might be the dealer in some gambling game who had the long end of all the wagers and still so protected his money that he could not lose however the cards turned.--‘from his helpless creature be repaid pure Gold for what he lent him dross-allayed.’--‘thou who didst with pitfall and with gin beset the Road I was to wander in--.’\n\nBut to me that seems a cheap attitude toward you, God. I admit you are fair. If I thought you weren’t my mind would not vex itself with you at all. I can not make you out a crooked dealer nor one who lends out bad money and demands good money in repayment.\n\nBut you are reticent and cold-tempered and uninterested. So it seems. The necklace which you gave me so long ago, made of little curses, I wear always round my spirit-neck. It serves some purpose, perhaps, and it answers as a keepsake: so at least I may not forget you whether or not you forget me. I don’t ask any more of your attention nor anything more of you than I would be willing to give you in return. But I wish you would be willing to exchange attention with me. I am lonely. I am terrified. I am frightfully overshadowed by myself and my odd aloofness and my thronging solitary emotions and my menacing trivialities. I am always fearing not that I may be wicked or immoral or allied with evils--I don’t really care a tinker’s curse about that--but that I may be growing petty and trivial and weak. It is horrible, horrible to feel that I may be a weakling--you, God, may not know how horrible to me. It is like black annihilation for all eternity when my Soul longs frantically, desperately to live. I feel weakness to be the only immoralness--hateful and vile in whatever aspect. I want to be strong to endure and to live in noonday lights and to overcome my poorness. I want, though I’m far from it, to be brave and big. What I admire you for, though you’re so far off and strange and inexplicable, is that you are strong. You are Strength, you are Light, you are the Solution and the Absolute. You’d hardly know what weakness is if it did not so crop out in this human race you made. This human race is a faërily beautiful thing: star-flaming poets have sung in it: lovely youth has breathed upon it: happy wild hearts have informed it. But the odd keynote of it all is weakness. And I have felt me tuned overmuch by that keynote.\n\n--but I won’t be weak, I won’t be, I won’t be, God! Whether you pay attention or not, whether I breathe only futileness, I will be strong, strong, strong in myself--strong if only in my falseness--strong and strong again--\n\nThis would be your chance with me if you cared to take it: because I own now just my plain two dresses. When I grow out of this quiet mood--(if ever I do: I begin to doubt it)--I shall have more dresses, and then I shall think about them, God, and the phases of life they’ll build up around me, and not about you. It’s not that pretty frocks would take my attention away from you if you once claimed it. Once you claimed my attention it would be yours forever. But pretty frocks would mean I am again walking in paved peopled roads. Being there without your attention I shall go where my garments may lead me forgetful of you. One’s life is of the flavor of one’s clothes: ‘the wine must taste of its own grapes.’\n\nNow feels like a fitting time for you to be personal with me, to give me a sign that you know I’m here. I know I am blind and ignorant about that. You may know a time that shall be more fitting, a time when my still mood and two dresses are long gone and my life is made of fluff and lightness so your sign will crash into it like a black two-ton meteor. I only tell you how it seems. If you should come now and speak to me I should feel suddenly glad. To-day feels such a day-of-God. The sky is all wet silver and the air a thin cloud of gold. I sit writing you by my window, often looking out with my forehead resting against the cool pane. There is an ache in my forehead, in my insteps, in my backbone and in my spirit. By stopping in here a moment you would gladden me. If you could give me, or show me--where it perhaps had always been--one true thing to have always in my life I should cling to it and ask nothing of it but that it remain true. If you’d make me one far-off promise of a dawn to come after this tired darkness I would take your word for it and would walk toward your dawn in a straight road from which I should not ever turn aside. In me is a small torch glowing though set in chaos. By its light I should keep in the road leading to your dawn. I should keep in it at any sacrifice to my merely human self: any sacrifice, believe me.\n\nIt isn’t a bargain I would make with you. I don’t like the thought of a bargain with you. I would rather take the chance and lose honestly: not in everything but in this matter with you. You show me the road and I take it for the sole reason that it’s a true one. I should expect myself to pay the tolls--heavy ones since I’m innately a liar, a someway bad lot. I know, the same as I know one and one make two, that I’ve only to be square in the human business of living to get back a square deal, though I’ll get badly battered, with it. But it isn’t what I mean. Something inside me hungers for answeringness--a Gleam--to make me know the worldly squareness and the battering are worth while beyond themselves: but a detail in the game.\n\nYou mightn’t guess it but I am diffident about broaching this much that may sound like a plea, so I’ll say no more of it.\n\nBut before I close the letter I want to tell you that I’m not wanting in gratitude for the terrible beauty of this world. I feel with ecstasy the burning loveliness of the life you give the human race.\n\nI want to tell you thank-you for some things in it. But all that they mean I can not tell in words.\n\nOnly yesterday a light at sundown lingered on the hill-tops and on the desert back of the School of Mines in tints of Olive and Copper and Ochre and Rose so delicate, so radiant, so dumbly forlorn that I closed my eyes against it all as I walked along the sand: its aliveness, its realness, its flawless golden dreadful peace tortured and twisted and too-keenly interpreted me.\n\nAnd one summer day in Central Park in New York I saw a little Yellow-Yellow Butterfly fluttering above a small plot of brilliant Green-Green Grass in the afternoon sunshine. To you, God, used to the purpling splendor of untold worlds that mightn’t seem noteworthy. But to me--because I am half-sister to so many trivialities the Yellow-Yellow of those little wings and the sweet bright Green of the clipped velvet Grass beneath the sun suddenly fiercely entered in and beat-beat hard on my imagination. O the glare and the flare of that fairy prettiness! I shall never forget that picture though I should one day see those worlds. It made me think wildly of you, God, at the time--and ever since. It is there yet in Central Park, that particular plot of Grass, and if not that Yellow-Yellow Butterfly--happily, happily Yellow it was--then another!\n\nAnd to-day and often other days I read this--\n\n‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’--\n\n--magic words: potent hushed wizardry of beauty. It opens the doors of all the Inner Rooms and more blest, more precious, of the celestial brain of him who wrote it. In making the glimmering Purple of all your worlds, God, you have not surpassed the thing you made in the regal wistful glory of John Keats.\n\nAnd two nights ago I went close to my glass and looked deep into my own dark gray eyes, and they were beautiful. Their color is the gray not of peace but of stormy sky and clouded sea. Their expression is alien and melancholy and they are never without circlings of fatigue or stress. And when I meet their glance they mostly accuse and condemn and confound me. But two nights ago they grew wide and deep and breathless-looking at realizing me human and alive. And presently I saw, back of their gray iris--my Soul: like a naked girl: like a willow in the wind: like a drowning star at daybreak: an inherent inexpressible grace--my Soul of many ages.\n\nAnd this moment another little memory, God, of a tropic marsh a little way back from the sea on the island in the bay at St. Augustine, as it looked in the wane of one sun-flooded February day. In the marsh were tall waving feathery salt-marsh grasses, and little pools of murky water. And there were snail-shells and ancient barnacles and smooth beach pebbles. And bordering the pools were reeds and flags and tiny wax-petaled death-white lilies. By a mound of wet moss was a slim wild blue heron standing on one leg and staring about and preening its blue feathers. And over all the scene was a Pink-Pink Flush. The curving quivering tops of the long grass were Pink with it. The pools were dull Pink mirrors. The barnacles, the pebbles, the death-white lilies were as if a thin bloody veil had been flung down on them. Pink touched the heron’s wings, its beak, its head, its glittering beady eyes and spindly leg. The sinking sun shot a Pink broadside of dream-dust all over the marsh: it lingered and hung and floated. Almost I could have reached out my two hands and gathered a bouquet of Pink Flush. The stillness, which was intense, was Pink stillness. O but it was pleasant, pleasant, pleasant, God--it wrapped me in a scarf of Pink sweetness: it filled my throat with Pink honey: it laid on me a gentle eager quiet covetous Pink spell.\n\nNobody knows how you do it, God. But it is all--Sunset Tint, Yellow-Yellow Moth, Conscious Soul, Poet-Flame--maddening and precious and terrifying and transfiguring to me who live among it. I cherish it as a lonely one may who loves it with passion and is never happy in it. And for it all I thank you, God.\n\nYours very sincerely, Mary MacLane.\n\nI wrote the Letter on my long-unused monogram note-paper to please my whim, and put it in the envelope and addressed it to God, care of the Whistling Winds. He may receive it--what do I know?--only he knows, and is reticent.\n\nI only know he’ll not answer it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "12 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A working diaphragm", "text": "I am not Respectable nor Refined nor in Good Taste.\n\nI take a delicate M.-Mac-Lane pleasure in those facts.\n\nI doubt if they are anyway peculiar to me, but they feel like a someway delicious clandestine circumstance: something to enjoy all to myself.\n\nIt is difficult to imagine any woman really Respectable on her inner side, the side that is turned toward herself alone. And it’s certain no woman is Refined: it feels not possible. (There are yet inland places where the word is used in its smug sense and believed in.) And no woman but a dead woman in her coffin is in complete Good Taste. Every live woman has for instance a working diaphragm: and in a diaphragm there is, in the final analysis, simply no taste at all.\n\n(As for men--except poets--I mean poets: and perhaps scientists--they are so ungenuine: a race of discreet cautious puppets: wooden dolls who move as their strings are pulled: with nothing so real about them inside as even outside--what use to dwell upon them?)\n\nNearly all women are perplexingly interesting as human beings. And I am quite the most interesting human being I know: and with it the most appealing, the most sincere--in my own false fashion, and the most bespeaking.\n\nIt is much due to knowing and feeling me to be not Respectable nor Refined nor in Good Taste: particularly to being not in Good Taste.\n\nOne autumn evening in Boston I went to dine with a man in his apartment in Beacon Street. He is a mining engineer whom I have known since we were both children. He had bidden me to dinner in his off-hand engineering way, but when I arrived at his diggings he was not there. He did not come. Instead there was a dinner waiting, a Japanese boy to serve it, and a strange man who had happened in. The strange man had iron-gray hair, a brow like Apollo, a jowl like Bill Sikes and much conversation. He said that he was newly from China, South Africa and Egypt and that in his life he had been married seven times with book and bell. Together we ate the dinner, talking pleasantly in the light of colored Chinese lamp-shades. There were little birds to eat and Chinese wine to drink--sam shu distilled virilely from rice: always a little of it is too much. After the dinner we were standing by a teakwood sideboard and the strange man was holding me tightly in his arms against a large smooth evening panel of shirt-front, and he was kissing my mouth with a great deal of ardor. I did not like it. I thought of all the women he had married and wondered if they had liked it. And I mused in my placid brain, ‘As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.’ It was the only thought in my mind as I waited boredly for him to have done. (It’s no good struggling.) And that incident I know was not Respectable.\n\nAnd one summer day I was riding horseback up a steep gorge in these Montana hills. It was hot dusty riding. I came to a mountain stream with a beautiful little white-and-blue cascade tumbling over a high rock upon smooth pebbles below. I got down from my horse, took off my dusty khaki suit and all my clothes and stood under the fall of the little tumbling cascade, whitely naked, without so much as a figleaf’s covering. It was delectable and pagan, what with my quaint thoughts as I stood crouched beneath the sparkling splash. And I know there was nothing Refined in it.\n\nAnd one evening between nine and ten, a week ago. I was walking across the broad desert valley east of this Butte. It is late November and the night was stormy. A strong high gale swept the Flat. Presently it rained. I was on my way back with a mile or two to go. It rained harder. Heavy sheets of black water whipped and whirled down on me and wrapped me in their wet wings. I love all weather when it is mild and more when it is rough except when it bears down too hard: then I feel indifferent to it. As I moved along the dark road not hurrying and not loitering I was saying inside me, ‘Why am I going to any shelter out of this heavy wet rain? Why am I not a houseless beggar-woman with nothing gentler in all my life than this November storm? It is not because I deserve gentler things--’ And with a sudden heavy shudder I whispered, ‘I wish I were a beggar-woman! I wish I had no roof to cover me in this cold night-blackness. It would be honest: I should be stripped to my deserts. And I wish it were so--this drenching rain, this strangling wind--nothing but this--shelter, money, comfort, self-satisfaction, however seemingly earned, are dishonest--thieved. I ought to be--ragged beggar--bleared eyes--dirty petticoats--a foul ratty hole to creep into--hunger--bodily misery--all the portion of outcasts-- As God may hear me--I’d eagerly tremblingly change lives this moment with a beggar-woman. I would--I would--!’ It is a piece of clear inside truth about myself. And I know it proves me to be in poor Taste.\n\nIt is a matter of attitude. Each of those incidents might happen to any woman--except perhaps the last. I have known but one girl who agreed with me in such a feeling. And not quite that feeling. She had married a lot of money with a horrible old gentleman and had wearied of both. But the other two episodes could readily belong to any woman of esprit who might be on the outside both Respectable and Refined: even a woman lawyer.\n\nBut my attitude in the incident of the strange iron-gray man, though in a bored way I could have viciously knifed him, was not a Respectable attitude. I was bored and fanciful when doubtless I ought to have been breathlessly angry. But my breathless anger is too rare and beautiful an emotion to waste on ridiculous strange iron-gray men.\n\nIn the incident of the sparkling cascade my attitude was shameless: something of the sort. It is never reprehensible for a woman to take a cold shower-bath in solitude and health. But my spirit rose and rejoiced at my bodily nakedness and then grew nymph-like and figleafless on its own account. My sex exploited itself in mental visions, like of Leda and the Swan or of myself as a slim villainous Scotch Aphrodite conceived by a bold surprising Titian. And doubtless I ought to have felt timorous in the vast sunlit mountainside, or like a sexless child (or merely ‘hygienic’ like William Muldoon and Bernarr McFadden). But the quick charm of the situation and the heavenly anguish of the icy water, and my lovely Body, and my odd moralless musings were too intriguing to expend themselves banalely.\n\nThe wet night road and the beggar-woman wish: it is drearily real to me. Though I wear two plain dainty dresses, in a house--in me, beating, beating, pounding down is a cold wild heavy rain: and under my feet a long lonely muddy road. If they belong to me--well. I love Me the more for feeling them.\n\nAnd I feel them because I am not yet dead and in my coffin, but alive and with a working diaphragm: which diaphragms are in not Good Taste."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "23 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Lot’s wife", "text": "To-day in the afternoon I briskly manicured my fingernails, sitting by my gold-and-blue window, and I mused upon Lot’s Wife.\n\nSo many persons and incidents and events and adventures and episodes there are to muse upon, in this mixed world, dating from when it began till now. There’s something to charm any mood. Let me leave the doors of my mind open and anything at all may float in like an errant butterfly on a summer’s day.\n\nIt is an entertaining world, by and large: a limitless vaudeville.\n\nLot’s Wife is to me a fantasy from the antique, a bit of archaic frivol to beguile me.\n\nWhen first I heard of her, from an acrid aunt of caustic humor who told me the tale tersely in explanation of a biblical print, I was seven years old. From that day to this my meditative thoughts have from time to time flitted backward to dwell interestedly upon Lot’s Wife. Later when I went to an Episcopal Sunday-school I was pleased to find this adjuration in according-to-St.-Luke: ‘Remember Lot’s Wife.’ There seemed no special meaning attached to it. It seemed like Remember Lot’s Wife in any way you like--as it might be with a card on her birthday, a useless gift at Christmas, in your prayers, or in retributive patriotism like Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine.\n\nBut I remember her because I like her.\n\nThere’s no name given for Lot’s Wife in the brief biblical narrative, so I long ago named her Bella as expressive of the temperament and character that have grown around her image in my thoughts. Poor Bella, I ruminated as I tinted and polished my nails. Her life in Sodom was not entirely satisfying to her. Sodom was a town completely given over to pleasure of the physical and outward sorts. The dwellers lived in and for their physical senses alone. And Bella had it in her to care for the foods of the spirit. Not that she longed for them--she was not so conscious of herself--but she had it in her to care for them had they been given her. Still, Sodom and its ways were the best she knew and she had known them all her life. The roots of her temperament had shot down into the Sodomesque substrata. She fondly loved the place.\n\nSodom was a prototype for Babylon or Pompeii, worshiping the hotness of the sun in moralless plaisance, with fêtes and drinkings of wine from gold and silver cups, and bathings in warm scented marble-lined pools, and anointings with oils of olive and palm, and dwellings among flowers of thin bright petals and birds of vivid plumage and fountains of crystal and rainbow, and caterings to the sparkle and froth of human emotions, and browsings amid loves and lights o’ love. Can Bella be wondered at for growing fond of it all, having known nothing substantialer? And can she rightly be blamed for hating the thought of leaving it for dry sage-brush wilds in the mountains? She did hate and dread that thought with all her soul from the moment it was made known to her that Sodom for its sins was booked for destruction. She had perhaps a fortnight in which to dread it, and a fortnight if given over to dread is long enough to damage stronger spirits than hers.\n\nBella was slender and svelte, with long straight soft beautiful silken pale red hair and white-lidded eyes of grayish green. She was thirty-eight--a young thirty-eight. There’s an old thirty-eight which applies to greedy school-teachers, gangrenous woman government-clerks, fading hard-hearted stenographers, over-righteous woman doctors; to all whose virtue is ever indecently on guard. But there’s a glory-tinted sun-kissed young thirty-eight which applies to sensitive high-strung generously-emotional women like Bella Lot. She had smooth hands with supple tapering fingers, an irregular expressive-lipped mouth like a pimpernel-bloom, firm slim feet and the quivering suggestive white knees of a wood-nymph. From any angle-of-view can she be blamed for hating to take that equipment away from the city-de-luxe which was its so proper setting and hiding it in the sage-brush?\n\nFurthermore Bella had a lover in Sodom. It is beyond a sane effort of the imagination that she could have loved that unpleasing old man Lot. The best and worst that can be said of him is that he was a fit addition to the company of the old Patriarchs who were for the most part an exceeding craven crew. The martyrs, the sages and especially the prophets had their splendors. But the lean old patriarchs--The sporting blood of all of them--in the sense of merest simplest courage--from Adam down, would hardly aggregate one drop. There are any number of reasons--as many as Bella had charms--to account for Lot’s having married her. But what she could have seen in him to make her wish or even willing to be married to him is a deep mystery to me. It may have been his family. I believe Bella lacked family: she was just a person. And was he not nephew to Abraham? But even being niece-in-law to Abraham himself seems insufficient compensation for being Lot’s Wife.\n\nThe Lots had two young daughters, one fifteen and one seventeen, it might be. I do not know their names--call them Ethel and Agnes. But they were of a recalcitrant temper and absorbed in their own racy pastimes among the younger youth of Sodom and they had no need of their mother. Besides, they ‘took after’ their father. So Bella was fain to turn outward in search of nurturing matter whereon to feed her humanness. Had it been expected of her to play fair with the patriarch she would have played fair. But it was not expected of her by anyone in Sodom--far from it, and least of all by the patriarch. She was eight-and-thirty, and Lot--he was doubtless eight or nine hundred years old, after the surprising long-lived fashion of the period.\n\nSo Bella found a lover ready and awaiting her. She would have found a lover in the circumstances even without caring to. But she quite cared to, I think. Everything points that way, and when one remembers that good old man her husband one can not censure her but only pity her. Be it as it may she had one--one as real as anything could be in that town of sparkling froth.\n\nOf the lover’s identity--little is known, as the historians say. My fancy as I filed my fingernails failed me on the point. Suffice it to state that ever and anon as time passed in Sodom the gray-green eyes of Bella were gazed into with fondness, affection, adoration and desire: the white eyelids of Bella had showers of light kisses bestowed on them, soft-falling as rose-petals shaken loose in summer winds: the tapering white hands of Bella were caressed and caressing with the oddly intense tenderness of physical love: the pale red hair of Bella was ruffled and fluffed and disarrayed by the fingers of love: the red-pimpernel mouth of Bella was touched, bruised, clung to by the lips of love: the svelte whiteness and nymph-knees of Bella glowed as she broached love’s arms:--and all went much merrier than marriage bells. In short, Bella paid herself with usury for the deadliness of being Lot’s Wife.\n\nAnd there we have the crux of Bella’s dread of leaving Sodom and its tempered sweetness for the arid sage-brush hills and the respectively cold and hectic companionship of the good old patriarch and the recalcitrant daughters.\n\nIt can not be claimed for Bella that any white poetic fires gleamed across her soul, that any limning beauty shone palely from within her. The air of Sodom was not conducive to suchlike matters and Bella was no finer than her breeding and generation. But she was gentle and wistful and kind of heart. She was lovely to look at and ingenuously lovable in her clinging affection and disarming naturalness. She was all one could want to imagine in the word charming.\n\nCame the night set for destruction and the Lot family fled according to schedule. They fled away in the early damps of an autumn evening through the outer city gates and along a rough road faintly lit by a dying moon. They had three separate reasons for fleeing. Lot fled because he was a patriarch and was given to doing craven Old-Testamentish things of that sort: Bella fled because she was Lot’s Wife and obliged to act out the rôle: and Ethel and Agnes fled because they had true patriarchal blood in their veins and had therefore no marked inclination to remain in Sodom to be annihilated--‘safety first’ was one of their watchwords. They fled in the van. Lot came after them, being less swift of foot. Bella lagged behind. She didn’t want to go. Every way she looked at it she didn’t want to go. She hated that flight for a thousand reasons.\n\nThe ghastly moon shed a terror on her with its dim rays. The ground was hard and rutted with frosty mud and bruised her slender feet through her white buckskin sandals.\n\nShe wore a loose ninon gown of white silk and linen with a gold girdle around her narrow loins and a gold clasp at the left shoulder. Binding her long hair, so palely red in the moon, was a white-and-gold fillet. In one hand she carried a gold-and-enamel link bracelet, a gift but that afternoon from the lover. Suddenly she stopped and cried to herself, ‘I’m too lovely for this fate--I’m too lovely and beloved--the cruelty of God--: I’ll not go on!’ She thought of the gleams and colorings of Sodom. She quickly reckoned the cost and decided to pay it. She was a rare good sport, and a quaint. She looked back at the doomed city blazing in brimstone--‘But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.’--\n\nAs I put away my chamois-skin buffer and glass paste-jar through my mind floated the pensive burden of a by-gone French song--\n\n‘Oh, the poor, oh, the poor, oh, the poor--dear--girl’--\n\nShe must have made a beautiful statue, all in glistening salt.\n\nI wish I had a glistening little salty replica of it to set on my desk: a so unusual, a so dainty conceit, Lot’s Wife!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "19 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "My echoing footsteps", "text": "While I live so still in this life-space, while I muse and meditate and analyze everything I touch, while I walk, while I work, while I change from one plain frock to the other: in quiet hours roiled tumbling storms of vicarious unhopeful Passion whirl, whirl in me: Passion of Soul, Passion of Mind, Passion of living, Passion of this mixed world: in terror, in wild unease, in reasonless mournful joy.\n\nI never knew real Passion, Passion-meanings, till I reached thirty. It is now I’m at life’s storm-center, youth’s climax, the high-pulsed orgasmic moment of being alive.\n\nAt twenty the woman’s chrysalis soul and aching pulses awaken in crude chaste Spring-cold beauty. At forty her fires either have subsided to dim-glowing coals or leaped to too-positive, too-searing, too-obvious flames--her bones and the filigrees of her spirit may be alike dry, brittle-ish. But at thirty her Spring has but changed to midsummer. Poesy still waits upon her Passions.\n\nMy Spring has changed, bloomed, burst to midsummer.\n\nSoft electrical heat-currents of being swing and sweep around me. They touch me and enter my veins. But the liquid essences of youth still quell and compass them. I am at youth’s climax--a half-sullen, half-smouldering youth which still is youth.\n\nMy rose of life is fragrant and aglow. Its sweet pink petals are uncurled and conscious in the wavering light.\n\nWinds flutter and stir and rumple and twist those petals--\n\nTo-day is a To-morrow of countless unrests. Large and little Passions beat at me all the blue-and-copper day. I walked my floor with irregular lagging steps. I felt menacing, dangerous to myself, dynamic as nitro-glycerine: and smoothly drearily sane as a bar of white soap. I stood at my window and looked long at the circling range of mountains which skirt this Butte. Nothing else I have looked at, of sea or plain or hill, affected me like that chain of barren peaks. They are arid splendor and pale purple witchery and grief and lasting sadness and deathlike beauty and woe and wonder. Their color quietly stormed my eyes and blurred them with tears.\n\nIt was a mood in which any color or gleam or thought or strain of music or note of sad world-laughter or any un-sane loveliness of poetry could enchant or flay or transport me to my frayed last nerve.\n\nThere is terror in facing death on battlefields, on sinking ships, in black ice-floes, in blazing buildings. But to me no death, for I fear no death, could be so dreadfully pregnant with in-turning woe and frenzy and all intolerable feeling as facing starkly my futile life.\n\nMy life is a vast stone bastile of many little Rooms in which I am a prisoner. I am locked there in solitude on bread and water and let to roam in it at will. And each Room is tenanted by invisible garbled furies and dubious ecstasies. I run with echoing footsteps from Room to Room to escape them: but each Room is more unhabitable than the last. There are scores of little Rooms, each with its ghosts, each different.\n\nIn one Room silent voices in the air accuse my tired Spirit of wanton vacillations and barren lack of purpose and utter waste, waste, waste of itself. And they threaten death and destruction. I know that accusation and I hate it: I hate it the more for that it’s wholly just. To escape it I run from that Room along a dim passage into another one. In it unseen fingers clutch my Heart. In their touch also is an accusation: of selfishness and waste and want of something to beat for: and in their touch is the savor of wild wishes and human longings and passionate prayers for something warm and simple and real to rest against: and in their pressing clutching turbulent touch is a tormenting half-promise, chance-promise, no-promise: and the hovering inevitable threat of death and destruction. That too I know and hate and half-love: and I can’t bear it. So I run out of that Room along a passage and into another. I hear my footsteps echoing as I run.\n\n--as a child when I ran in the early night through a dark leaf-lined tunnel-like driveway the sound of my own flying footsteps on the hardened gravel was the only thing that frightened me. I quite believed there were bears in the brushwood on either side, but fear of them never struck to the core of my child-being like the unknown thing in my echoing steps. And it is fear I feel now from the ghost-sound of my ghost-footsteps running, running away from the little Rooms. It is realer to me now than were my child footsteps to my child-self long ago: it is more definite than my hand which writes this: it is hideous--\n\nOut of a dim passage I run into another little Room. In it some gray filmy threads, like strands of loose cobwebs caught on ceilings, float about. They sweep gently against my cheeks and hands and neck, and cling and twine and lightly hold with the half-felt feeling peculiar to bits of cobwebs on the skin. And it torments my woman-flesh with calefacient thrills fierce and goading and sweet. There also is the accusation, now against my Body; for tissues and strength wasted: for useless fires meant to warm human seeds to life, meant to make me fruitful, meant to make me bear dear race-burdens: accusation for the cosmic waste of hot objectless desire, for the subtle guilt of a Lesbian tendency, for an unleashed over-positive sex-fancy. With it too is the lowering promise of death and destruction. It also is just. But out of my borne-along helplessness in it comes no culpable emotion because of cobweb thrills and their arraignment but only a wearing wearying despair. I rush out of that Room in shrugging impatience, with only scorn for a threat of death, for a threat of destruction--but with a wild fear of my own flying steps. I hurry and hurry on from door to door: but it’s no good. In some other Room my brain is anathematized from frowning walls as an impish demoniac power which I use with no good intent and therefore with bad intent: and again I shrink and run away. In another Room are all the lies I have ever told: I have told legions--my own peculiar lies, gentler on me than truths: they dart around me in the Room like black heavy-winged moths, clouds of them fluttering at my forehead. They drive me out shivering. In another Room four times when I was a not-good-sport confront me in a row like pictures and sting me and make me hide my eyes: I’d rather be a leper, a beast, a maniac than a not-good-sport (for my own precious reasons)--and I rush away again. In some other Room--\n\n--the same galling torment in all the Rooms. Wherever I run with the echo-echo of steps there are Accusing voices and half-formed Prayer and uncertain Yearning and violent yet dumb and inexpectant Protest and the unfailing Threat of death and destruction: not earth-death but universe-death: death and death and death everywhere coming on and on: myself knowing the just note in it all and from it grown numb with some cold and restless terror. Also I know no door I run through with my panic-feet will ever set me free of the bastile except a death door: the earthly death of this tired life--\n\nBut it’s from this maelstrom that the flashing burning sparkling mad magic of being alive leaps out brilliant and barbarous--and throbbing and splendid and sweet. A merely human hunger comes back on me. Then I want all I ever wanted with a hundredfold more voltage of wanting than I have ever yet known.\n\nI am all unhopeful, all unpeaceful, all a desperate Languor and a tragic Futileness: I am an unspeakably untoward thing.\n\nAnd already I have been seared and scarred trivially from standing foolishly near some foolish human melting-pots.\n\nNo matter for any of it. I want to plunge headlong into life--not imitation life which is all I’ve yet known, but honest worldly life at its biggest and humanest and cruelest and damnedest: to be blistered and scorched by it if it be so ordered--so that only it’s realness--from the outside of my skin to the deeps of my spirit.\n\nIt is not happiness I want--nothing like it: its like never existed since this world began.\n\nI want to feel one big hot red bloody Kiss-of-Life placed square and strong on my mouth and shot straight into me to the back wall of my Heart.\n\n* * * * *\n\nI write this book for my own reading.\n\nIt is my postulate to myself.\n\nAs I read it it makes me clench my teeth savagely: and coldly tranquilly close my eyelids: it makes me love and loathe Me, Soul and bones.\n\nClench and close as I will the winds flutter and stir and crumple and twist my petals as they will:--as I sit here tiredly, tiredly sane."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "28 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A comfortably vicious person", "text": "The blue-and-copper of yesterday is dead and buried this To-morrow in a maroon twilight.\n\nI this moment saw darkly from my window the somber hills in their heavy spell of pale-purple and grief and splendor and sadness and beauty and wonder and woe.\n\nBut their color brings no tears to my wicked gray eyes.\n\nThe passion-edged mood is burnt out.\n\nGone, gone, gone.\n\nI listlessly change into the other black dress for listless dinnertime and all my thought is that my abdomen is beautifully flat and that I must purchase a new petticoat.\n\nI rub a little rouge on my pale mouth and I idlingly recall a clever and filthy story I once heard.\n\nI laugh languidly at it and feel myself a comfortably vicious person.\n\nI pronounce a damn on the familiar ache in my beloved left foot and turn away from myself.\n\nI stick out the tip of my forked-feeling tongue at the bastard clock on the stairs. I note the hour on it with a fainness in my spirit-gizzard to dedicate Me from that time forth to a big blue god of Nastiness: Nastiness so restful, humorous, appetizing, reckless, sure-of-itself.\n\n--these hellish To-morrows creeping in their petty pace: they bring in weak-kneed niceness, and they bring in doubts, and they bring in meditation and imagery and all-around humanness, till I’m a mere heavy-heeled dubious complicated jade."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "5 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "In my black dress and my still room", "text": "I have fits of Laughter all to myself.\n\nThe world is full of funny things. All to myself I Laugh at them. I lounge at my desk in the small night hours, and I finger a pencil or a box or a rubber or a knife and rest my chin on my hand, and sit on my right foot, and Laugh intermittently at this or that.\n\nHa! ha! ha! I say inwardly: with all my Heart: relishingly.\n\nI laugh at the thought of a mouse I once encountered lying dead--so neat, so virtuous--though soft and o’er-long dead--with its tail folded around it--in a porcelain tea-pot: a strong inimical anomaly to all who viewed it. It had a look of a saint in effigy in a whited sepulcher. Looked at as a mouse it seemed out of place. Looked at as a saint it was perfect.\n\nI Laugh at the recollection of a lady I once met who had thick black furry eyebrows incongruous to her face, which she took off at night and laid on her bureau. They were at once ‘detached’ and detachable: itself a subtle phenomenon. She referred to her mind as her ‘intellects’ and talked with a quaint bogus learnedness, and in remarkable grammar, of the Swedenborgian doctrines. Looked at as a person she was inadequate. Looked at as a conundrum she was gifted and profound.\n\nI Laugh at that extraordinary tailor in the Mother Goose rhyme--him ‘whose name was Stout,’ who cut off the petticoats of the little old woman ‘round about,’ herself having recklessly fallen asleep on the public highway. The tale leaves me the impression that such were the straitly economic ideas of the tailor that he obtained all his cloth by wandering about with his shears until he happened upon persons slumbering thus publicly and vulnerably. Looked at in any light that tailor is ever surprising, ever original, ever rarely delectable.\n\nI Laugh at William Jennings Bryan.\n\nHow William Jennings Bryan may look to the country and world-at-large I have never much considered.\n\nIt is all in the angle of view: St. Simeon Stilites may seem rousingly funny to some: Old King Cole may have been a frosty dullard to those who knew him best.\n\nTo me William Jennings Bryan means bits of my relishingest brand of gay mournful Laughter.\n\nThe ensemble and detail of William Jennings Bryan and his career as a public man, viewed impersonally--as one looks at the moon--is something hectic as hell’s-bells.\n\nI remember William Jennings Bryan when his star first rose. It was before Theodore Roosevelt was more than a name: before the battleship Maine was sunk at Havana: before Lanky Bob wrested the heavyweight title from Gentleman Jim at Carson: before aëroplanes were and automobiles were more than rare thin-wheeled restless buggies: before the song ‘My Gal She’s a High-born Lady’ had yet waned: before one Carrie Nation had hewn her way to fame with a hatchet. I was a short-skirted little girl devouringly reading and observing everything, and I took note of all those. So I took note of William Jennings Bryan nominated for president by the Democratic convention in eighteen-ninety-six. The zealous Democratic newspapers referred to him, though he was then thirty-six, as the Boy Orator of the Platte. Looked at as a grown man, advocating free coinage of silver at sixteen-to-one--a daring dashing Democrat, he was a plausible thing and even romantic. Looked at as a Boy Orator he turned at once into a bald and aged lad oddly flavored with an essence of Dare-devil Dick, of the boy on the burning deck, of a kind of political Fauntleroy madly matured.\n\nLong years later with the top of his hair and his waistline buried deep in his past he became Secretary of State: and at the same time a Chautauqua Circuit lecturer--entertaining placid satisfied audiences alternately with a troupe of Swiss Yodlers. Of all things, yodlers. Politics makes strange bedfellows and always did. But never before has the American Department of State combined and vied with the yodler’s art to entertain and instruct. Looked at as a monologist he might pass if sufficiently interpolated with ah-le-ee! and ah-le-o-o! Looked at as Secretary of State he is grilling and gruelling to the senses: a frightful figure quite surpassing a mouse softly dead in a tea-pot, a pair of detachable fuzzy Swedenborg-addicted eyebrows, a presumptuously economical tailor.\n\nAnd he entertained the foreign ministers at a state dinner, did this unusual man, and he gave them to drink--what but grape-juice, grape-juice in its virginity. Plain water might have seemed the crystalline expression of a rigid puritanic spirit. Budweiser Beer, bitter and bourgeois, might have been possible though surprising. But grape-juice, served to seasoned Latin Titles and Graybeards and Gold-Braid, long tamely familiar with the Widow Clicquot: that in truth seems, after all the years, boyishly oratorical, wildly and darkly Nebraskan. Looked at as an appetizing wash for a children’s white-collared and pink-sashed party, or for anybody on a summer afternoon, grape-juice is satisfactory. In the careless hands of William Jennings Bryan with his soul so unscrupulously at peace, the virgin grape-juice becomes a vitriolic thing: a defluent purple river crushing one’s helpless spirit among its rocks and rapids.\n\n--a terrible American, William Jennings Bryan. He is for ‘peace at any price.’ There were some, long and long ago, who suffered and endured one starveling winter in camp at Valley Forge that William Jennings Bryan might wax Nebraskanly fat: and he is valiantly for peace: at any price--\n\nFor that my Laughter is tinged with fulfilling hatred.\n\nRich hot-livered Laughter must have in it essential love or hatred.\n\nTo William Jennings Bryan everything he has done in his political career must seem all right.\n\nIt is all right, undoubtedly. Just that.\n\n--that Silver-tongued Boy Orator\n\nthose Yodlers\n\nthat Peerless Leader\n\nthat Grape-juice--\n\nThey come breaking into my melancholy night-hours with an odd high-seasoned abruptness.\n\nI wonder what God thinks of him.\n\nIt might be God thinks well of him.\n\nBut I--in my black dress and my still room--I say inwardly and willy-nilly, and with all my Heart and relishingly:\n\nHa! ha! ha!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "8 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Their little shoes", "text": "Often in windy autumn nights I lie awake in my shadowy bed and think of the children, the Drab-eyed thousands of children in this America who work in coal mines and factories.\n\nWhenever I’m wakeful and the night is windy and my room is dark and I lie in aloneness--a long aloneness: centuries--then shadows come from far-off world-wildnesses and float and flutter dimly unhappy around my bed. They tell me tales of shame and tame petty hopelessness and trifling despair.\n\nAnd the one that comes oftenest is the one that tells of those Drab-Eyed children distances from here, but very immediate, who work in coal mines and factories. I read about them in magazines and newspapers, but they aren’t then one one-hundredth so real as when their shadow floats as close to me in the windy autumn night.\n\nOnce in Pennsylvania I saw a group of children, very Drab in the Eyes and very thin in the necks and legs, who worked in a mill. Their look made its imprint in my memory and more in my flesh. And it comes back as if it were the only thing that mattered as I lie wakeful in the windy night.\n\nThe children--unconscious and smiling their small decayed smiles--they are living and being crushed between greed and need as between two murderous millstones. Their frail flesh and their little brittle bones, their voices and their pinched insides, the sweet vague childish looks which belong in their faces are squeezed and crunched by two millstones--squeezed, squeezed till their scrawny fledgeling bodies are dry, breathless, and are gasping, strangling, striving frightfully for life: and still are slowly, all too slowly, dying between two millstones.\n\nIf it were their own greed or their own need--but it’s the greed of fat people and the need of their own warped gaunt parents. Betwixt the two the children meet homelike hideous ruin. Placidly they are cheated and blighted and blasted, placidly and with the utmost domesticness.\n\nThe most darkling-luminous thing about the Drab-Eyed children is that they never weep. They talk among themselves and smile their little dreadful decayed smiles, but they don’t weep. When they walk it’s with a middle-aged gait: when they eat their noontime food it’s as grown people do, with half-conscious economic and gastronomic consideration. They count their Tuesdays and Wednesdays with calculation as work-days, which should be childishly wind-sweptly free. Which is all of less weight than the heavy fact that they never weep.\n\nThey reckon themselves fairly fortunate with their bits of silver in yellow envelopes every Saturday. They are permitted to keep a bit of it, each child a bit for herself or himself, so that on Sunday afternoons they lose themselves for precious hours watching Charlie Chaplin. Many pink-faced inconsequent children whose parents nurture them and guard them and eternally misunderstand them are less worldlily lucky. But the pink-faced children often weep--loudly, foolishly like puppies and snarling furry cubs--and wet sweet salt tears of proper childishness are round and bright on their cheeks and lashes. It’s a sun-washed blestness for them: they’re impelled and allowed to weep. But the Drab Eyes shed no tears--they know no reason why they should. There’s no impulse for soft liquid grief in the murderous philosophy of two grinding millstones. And there’s no time--the lives of the work-children move on fast. Their very shoes are ground between the millstones.\n\n--their little shoes are heartbreaking. The millstones grind many things along with little-little shoes of children: germs of potent splendid humanness that might grow bigly American in heroic ways or in sane round honesty: germs that might grow into brave barbaric beauty or warm wistful sweetness: germs that would grow into lips blooming tender and fragrant as jonquils or into minds swimming with lyrics:--what is strongly lasting and glorified in the forlorn divine human thing--crumpled--twisted forever when millstones grind children’s little poor shoes--\n\nThe young Drab Eyes are endlessly betrayed: their very color thieved. There’s no reason why they should weep.\n\nBut there’s a far-blown sound as if ten thousand bad and good worldly eyes were weeping in their stead: with a note in it careless, compassionate and jadedly menacing.\n\nI seem to hear it in the wakeful windy night. And I hear no world-music pouring out of small throats of work-children shrill with woe-and-joy. The sound they make is a dumb sound, for they never weep: a ghost-wail of partly-dead children borne lowly across this mixed world on a stale hellish breeze."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "12 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The sleep of the dead", "text": "When I’m dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave: for I’m Tired, Tired always.\n\nMy Soul must go on as it has gone on up to now.\n\nIt has a long way to go, and it has come a long way.\n\nMy Soul first started on its journey somewhere in Asia before the dawn of this civilization. And it has gone on since through the centuries and through strange phases of Body, terrors of flesh and blood, suffering long. But it has gone someway on, each space of the journey taking it nearer to the journey’s-End.\n\nIt is the dim-felt memory of those journeys that heaps the Tiredness on me now. Not only is my spirit Tired. Through my spirit my hands are Tired: my knees are Tired: my drooping shoulders: my thin feet: my sensitive backbone. When I lift my hand in the sunshine the weight of the yellow honeyed air bears down and down on it because I’m so Tired. When I start to walk on stone pavements the ache of them is in my feet before I set a foot on them because I’m so Tired. The pulse in my veins Tires my blood as it beats. My low voice, though I speak but rarely--it Tires my throat. My breath Tires my chest. The weight of my hair Tires my forehead and temples. My plain frocks Tire my Body to wear. My swift trenchant thoughts Tire my Mind.\n\nIt is not the Tiredness of effort though I strive to the limits of my strength every day.\n\nIt is not pain, Restful pain. It is Tired Tiredness.\n\nSo when I’m dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave. It would Rest me.\n\nIn the Episcopal Church they use a ritual of poetic beauty, full of Restful things. One of them is the sleep of the dead. The crucified Nazarene slept three days. But all others of us when we go down into our graves are to sleep until a Judgment Day. ‘Judgment Day’ is preposterous and evilly crude: there’s no judgment till each can judge himself simply and cruelly in the morning light. But the sleep of the dead--\n\n--the sleep of the dead. Its sound by itself without the thought is Restful--\n\nAnd the thought is Restful.\n\nI imagine me wrapped in a shroud of soft thin wool cloth of a pale color, laid in a plain wood coffin: and my eyelids are closed, and my Tired feet are dead feet, and my hands are folded on my breast. And the coffin is nine feet down in the ground and the earth covers it. Upon that some green sod: and above, the ancient blue deep sheltering sky: and the clouds and the winds and the suns and moons, and the days and nights and circling horizons--those above my grave.\n\nAnd my Body laid at its length, eyes closed, hands folded, down there Resting: my Soul not yet gone but laid beside my Body in the coffin Resting.\n\n--might we lie like that--Resting, Resting, for weeks, months, ages--\n\nYear after long year, Resting."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "6 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Stickily mad", "text": "It is damn-the-Smell-of-Turpentine!\n\nHere I happen on a damn in me which is not desultory but bloodily strong and alive and alone.\n\nThe wood in my blue-white room has been newly painted. For a day and a night I intermittently encounter and go to bed in a spirit of Turpentine. It bears a cruel obscure abortive message to my nerves.\n\nI lie wakeful in the dark and try to reason out a logicalness or poetry in a thing so artfully pestilential. But I am hysterically lost in it and my heart beats hysterically in it.\n\nI remember the inexpressible ingenuity of man: of white man as against bone-brained savage races. Every invented usefulness feels like divine witchcraft. A pen and a bottle of perfume and a door-knob and a granite kettle and an electric light: I have the use of each since white man is so ingenious. Were I a red Indian I should have only the awkward barbarous stupid tools my race had used a thousand years. I contrast the two as I lie wakeful, with a sense of richness and of detailed repletion and of material blestness.\n\nBut at once comes the Smell of Turpentine and announces itself something outside that and different, something stronger, something masterfuler than ingenuity and savagery together. It tortures my nerves: it burns my eyes: it lames my flesh: it jerks and flays and garbles my inner body. The ingenuity of man has produced opium and cocaine which would combat and hide it all behind a heavy curtain of stupor, with effects equally damaging if less grievously subtle.\n\nThe Smell of Turpentine is a thing to bear since all its counter-things bring only solider evil.\n\nThe paint was put on the wood by a dirty little man whom I briefly inspected as something removed from my range of life. In return he covertly eyed me. I expected my wakeful hours would be punished by strong new paint and be-visioned by dirty little men. But it is all sheer Turpentine with a power suggesting nothing human nor super-natural nor divine. Just itself: a goblin virulence.\n\nIn all my Soul and bones and Mary-Mac-Laneness it is damn-the-Smell- of-Turpentine as a bastard murderous hurt.\n\nI have an odd feeling God has no more power over it than have I.\n\nIt half-calls for a different Turpentine God.\n\nI am shakily mad tonight, I believe, from a so slight sticky matter."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "12 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "God compensates me", "text": "It’s a Sunday midnight and I’ve just eaten a Cold Boiled Potato.\n\nI shall never be able to write one-tenth of my fondness for a Cold Boiled Potato.\n\nA Cold Boiled Potato is always an unpremeditated episode which is its chief charm.\n\nIt’s nice to happen on a book of poetry on a window-sill. It’s nice to surprise a square of chocolate in a glove box. It’s nice to come upon a little yellow apple in ambush. It’s nice to get an unexpected letter from Jane Gillmore. It’s nice to unearth a reserve fund of silk stockings under a sofa pillow. And especially it’s nice to find a Cold Boiled Potato on a pantry shelf at midnight.\n\nI like caviare at luncheon. And I like venison at dinner, dark and bloody and rich. And I like champagne bubbling passionately in a hollow-stemmed glass on New Year’s day. And I like terrapin turtle. And I like French-Canadian game-pie. And artichokes and grapes and baby onions. And none of them has the odd gnome-ish charm of a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.\n\nI can imagine no circumstance in which a Cold Boiled Potato would not take precedent with me at midnight. If I had a broken arm: if I had a husband lying dead in the next room: if I were facing abrupt worldly disaster: if there were a burglar in the house: if I’d had a dayful of depression: if God and opportunity were knocking and clamoring at my door: I should disregard each and all some minutes at midnight if I had also a Cold Boiled Potato.\n\nI love to read Keats’s Nightingale in my hushed life. I love to remember Caruso at the Metropolitan singing Celeste Aïda. I love to watch the bewitching blonde Blanche Sweet in a moving picture. I love to feel the summer moonlight on my eyelids. And it’s disarmingly contented I am with a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.\n\nContent is my rarest emotion and I get it at midnight out of a Cold Boiled Potato.\n\nSome things in life thrill me. Some drive me garbledly mad. Some uplift me. Some debauch me. Some strengthen and enlighten me. Some hurt, hurt, hurt. But I’m not thrilled nor maddened nor uplifted nor debauched nor strengthened nor enlightened nor hurt, but only fed-up and fattened in spirit by a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.\n\nI stand in the pantry door leaning against the jamb, with a tiny glass salt-shaker in one hand and the sweet dark pink Cold Boiled Potato in the other. And I sprinkle it with salt and I nibble, nibble, nibble. And I say aloud, ‘Gee, it’s good!’\n\nI liked Cold Boiled Potato at four-and-twenty. I liked it at seventeen. I liked it at twelve. At three I climbed on cake-boxes in search of one. And now in the deep bloom of being myself I am made roundly replete at midnight with a Cold Boiled Potato.\n\nA Cold Boiled Potato--it tastes of chestnuts at midnight, the first frost-kissed chestnuts in the woods: and it tastes of rain-water and of salt and of roses: it tastes of young willow-bark and of earth and of grass-stems: it tastes of the sun and the wind and of some nameless relishingness born of the summer hillside that grew it: it tastes at midnight so like a Cold Boiled Potato.\n\nA precious peach-colored orchid, an antique spider-web-like lace handkerchief, a delicate purple butterfly, an emerald bracelet: I’d strive for each of those in an eagerly casual way. But it’s like an ogre at midnight I pounce on a Cold Boiled Potato.\n\nA Cold Boiled Potato reminds me of the Dickens books in which so much food is eaten cold and tastes so savory--even the ‘wilderness of cold potatoes’ portioned to the Marchioness by Sally Brass. And it reminds me of the Rip Van Winkle play--‘give this fellow a cold potato and let him go.’ And it reminds me of Hamlet--funeral baked meats might include it. And it reminds me of Robin Hood’s merry men, and Huckleberry Finn, and the Canterbury Pilgrims, and the Prodigal Son, and all the picturesque wayfarers. It reminds me of the poor as a colorful race wrapped around with hungry romance. It reminds me that life is full of life--rich and fruitful and evolutionary and cosmic: few things feel so cosmic as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight. It makes me want as I nibble to plant a field of potatoes on a southern-exposed hill and hoe them and dig them all by myself: and give all but one to the poor and Boil that to eat Cold at midnight.\n\nI have to be very hungry to crave a Cold Boiled Potato, but being hungry no possible morsel of food can so interest me at midnight. The same potato hot is domestic and tasteless. The same potato at ten in the evening lukewarm within and sodden with memories of dinner, is a repellent item. At midnight it is all unexpected magnetism. At midnight my whole being is profoundly courteous, wooingly cordial toward a Cold Boiled Potato.\n\nIf I had only what I deserved my portion might well be a Cold Boiled Potato. Intrinsically it is rated low and I know me to be a sort of jezebel. But I’d wonder each midnight if whoever metes out the deserts in this surprising universe knew with what gust I rise at it--would I get it.\n\nNor am I satisfied like the meek and lowly with my midnight supper of Cold Boiled Potato: damn the meek and lowly. It’s a satanic delight I take in it. It’s a sly private orgie I make of it: a pirate’s banquet, a thieves’ picnic, a pagan rite, a heathen revelry, a conceit all and unhallowedly my own. My thoughts as I nibble are set mostly on my villainies. No food I eat brings me so broad a license of feeling--a sense of freedom--as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.\n\nOn a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight I am lightly valorous: call me a trickster and I’ll call you a rotter: call me a liar and I’ll call you a traitor: call me a coward and I’ll call you another: not pugnaciously but gayly and serenely.\n\nI am then in my most bespeaking mood. Anyone who met me standing nibbling in a pantry doorway at midnight would be charmed. I would talk with a dainty ribaldry and offer to share the feast.\n\nFor shadow-things piled too near God compensates me in unexpected midnights with a Cold Boiled Potato: along with it a pantry doorway to stand in and a little glass salt-shaker to hold in my other hand."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "16 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The strange braveness", "text": "If God has human feelings he must often have a burning at the eyes and a fullness at the throat at the strange Braveness of human people: their Braveness as they go on in the daily life, with aching dumbish minds and disgruntled bereft bodies and flattened pinched gnawed hearts.\n\nThe easy human slattern way would be to sink beneath the burden.\n\nInstead, people: I and Another and all others--seamstresses and monotonous clerks and lawyers and housewives: sit upright in chairs and talk into telephones and walk fast and eat breakfasts and brush hair: all the while marooned in a morass of small wild unexciting tasteless Pain.\n\nOf others--what do I know?\n\nBut I might say, ‘Look, God, I am not fallen on the ground, from this and that--utterly lost and down. But sitting, drooping but strong, in a chair, mending a lamp-shade--neat, orderly and at-it in my misery.’"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "7 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Just beneath my skin", "text": "This I write is a strange thing.\n\nSo close to fact: so far from it.\n\nSo close to truth: so surrounded by lies.\n\nIt does not contain lies but is someway surrounded by a mist of lies.\n\nA strange thing about it is that it is expressing the Self Just Beneath My Skin.\n\nThat Self is someways trivial and outlandish and mentally nervous, flightly, silly--silly to a verge of tragicness. I know that to be true from a long acquaintance with me. It is oddly intriguing to read over some chapters and find it shown.\n\nSome unconscious exact photography aids my writing talent.\n\nSome chapters are bewilderingly and mysteriously true to life.\n\nMy everyday self that casually speaks to this or that person is nothing like this book. My absorbed self that writes a letter to an intimate acquaintance is not like this book. My heartfelt self that deeply loves a friend, and gives of its depths, and thrills answeringly to other depths, is not like this book.\n\nThis book is my mere Hidden Self--just under the skin but hid away closer than the Thousand Mysteries: never shown to any other person in any conversation or any association: never would be shown: never could be.\n\nHow Another, any Other, would come out: what Another would show: photographed Beneath the Skin--what do I know?\n\nPerchance ten times more trivial and inconsequent and mad than Me.\n\nIf Another thinks Me someway mad, let him look at Himself Just Beneath the Skin.\n\nPerchance Another every day as he thanks a janitor for holding open a door, would much prefer to drive a long rusty brad-nail deep into the janitor’s skull.\n\nPerchance Another has a brain like Goethe, a Soul like a humming-bird, a Heart like a little round nutmeg.\n\nWhat do I know?\n\nI know what I am.\n\nAnother may know what he is.\n\nBut I can’t tell Me to Another and Another can’t tell Himself to Me.\n\nI can tell Me to myself and write it.\n\nAnother if he reads will see Me: but not as I see Me. Instead, through many veil-curtains and glasses, very darkly."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "15 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "God’s kindly caprice", "text": "For twenty-five cents and one hour and twelve minutes one may get in this present detailed world a bit of unforgettable complete enchantment.\n\nSo I found to-day in a moving-picture theater. A Carmen, the real Carmen of Prosper Mérimée glowed, vibrated, lived and died with passion on a white screen.\n\nOf all prose writers I know Prosper Mérimée is the one--(intimate and sensitively alive as if I had lain against his shoulder as I read ‘La Guzla’ and ‘Venus d’Ille’--he melts into my veins--)whom I would most eagerly see interpreted. Of all fiction characters--if she is fiction--the poignant Carmen is the one I would most eagerly see realized.\n\nCarmen is one of those fictions which are truer to life than life is. Such fiction-things are all around, touching everybody: the spoken truths which grow false at being spoken: the thought lies which turn to truths the moment they touch words.\n\nI have heard Carmen sung and seen her filmed by the lustrous Farrar, and I have seen her play-acted by some lesser lights. But Bizet’s opera, a sparkling music-storm, creates a sonant objective Carmen, a beautiful bloody lyric, remote from Mérimée who made a Carmen intensely peculiar to his own subjective art. And the stage-Carmen has always been a stage-Carmen waiting in dusty, draughty wings for her cues. It remained for the cinematograph, which is a true literal mirror of human expression, to make Carmen burst into violent physical life.\n\nBut it was less the scopes of the films which made Carmen animate than it was the virile woman who played her. It was acting--but acting in the sense of losing and sinking and saturating and dissolving herself in another woman’s temperament: and by it she achieved some strong sword, keen shadings of the Carmen character--to the hair’s-breadth.\n\nAnd she looked like Carmen. It was not important to the vigorous fire of her acting but it made bewitchment in the portrait. No one I have before seen play Carmen fitted the elusive points of her description.\n\n‘Her eyes were set obliquely in her head but they were magnificent and large. Her lips, a little full but beautifully shaped, revealed a set of teeth as white as newly-skinned almonds. Her hair was black with blue lights on it like a raven’s wing, long and glossy. To every blemish she united some advantage which was perhaps all the more evident by contrast. There was something strange and wild about her beauty. Her face surprised you at first sight but nobody could forget it. Her eyes especially had an expression of mingled sensuality and fierceness which I had never seen in any human glance. Gypsy’s eye, wolf’s eye’--\n\nThis (from the English translation of the story by Lady Mary Loyd) fitted to a charm the pictured vision of the foreign-looking woman--her name is Theda Bara--who flung a throbbing Carmen across the screen with indescribable heat and color and luster. It was comparable only to the muscular force of the original which that Mérimée rubs nervously and heavily into one’s thoughts. I felt it someway satisfyingly unbelievable--an illusion more actual than actuality: a dream which outbore fact.\n\nI suppose there’s no other character like Carmen for flaming roundness in all fiction: filled with her treacheries yet purely true to herself, without fear, utterly game: fierce, coarse, ruthless and reckless yet wrapped in a maddening unwitting pathos: strong and bold and cruelly poised yet capable of sudden complete surrender: ignorant and abandoned and criminal in every instinct yet beyond every littleness, every pettiness: sensual yet contemptuous and indifferent in it, a woman of essential chastity. Carmen is the one criminal conception in whom there is no vulgar evil, no personal maculateness though wrecking all the wildness of her temper in her tempestuous days’-journeys. She is a romantic murderous appeal to human superjudgment. It was this isolate quality of her which Theda Bara gave out with mystic masterful art. She gauged the personal odors and blood-pressures of Carmen. She slipped into Carmen’s skin and first sucked in and then breathed out the irresistible menacingness and arresting ruination of her beautiful diabolic spirit. A little feverish artistic thrill ran in my veins as I sat in the dark watching.\n\n‘She had thrown her mantilla back,’ says Don José in the translated tale, ‘to show her shoulders and a great bunch of acacias that was thrust into her chemise. She had another acacia bloom in the corner of her mouth and she walked along swaying her hips like a filly from the Cordova stud farm. In my country anyone who had seen a woman dressed in that fashion would have crossed himself. In Seville every man paid her some bold compliment on her appearance. She had an answer to each and all with her hand on her hip--“Come, my love,” she began again, “make me seven ells of lace for my mantilla, my pet pin-maker.” And taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me.’\n\nThis first meeting of Carmen with the dragoon was pictured in a brilliant hot-looking plaza as if before the cigarette factory in Seville. This woman in throwing the flower at the soldier expressed wonderfully in one fleet moment, by hand and lip and eye, the savage sordid poetry and passionate freedom--that unearthly fragrance--which is Carmen.\n\nThe film version followed the scenes of the opera rather than the story, which took nothing from the headlong truth of the central figure.\n\nBut no picturing can equal the star-clarity of Mérimée’s prose in Carmen’s death-scene--a thing of a piercing pathos comparable to nothing I know in writing.\n\n‘After we had gone a little distance I said to her, “So, my Carmen, you are quite ready to follow me, isn’t it so?”\n\nShe answered, “Yes, I’ll follow you to the death--but I won’t live with you any more.”\n\nWe had reached a lonely gorge. I stopped my horse.\n\n“Is this the place?” she said.\n\nAnd with a spring she reached the ground. She took off her mantilla and threw it at her feet, and stood motionless with one hand on her hip, looking at me steadily.\n\n“You mean to kill me, I see that well,” she said. “It is fate. But you’ll never make me give in.”\n\nI said to her: “Be rational, I implore you; listen to me. All the past is forgotten. Yet you know it is you who have been my ruin--it is because of you that I am a robber and a murderer. Carmen, my Carmen, let me save you, and save myself with you.”\n\n“José,” she answered, “what you ask is impossible. I don’t love you any more. You love me still and that is why you want to kill me. If I liked I might tell you some other lie, but I don’t choose to give myself the trouble. Everything is over between us two. You are my rom and you have the right to kill your romi, but Carmen will always be free. A calli she was born and a calli she’ll die.”\n\n“Then you love Lucas?” I asked.\n\n“Yes, I have loved him--as I loved you--for an instant--less than I loved you, perhaps. And now I don’t love anything. And I hate myself for ever having loved you.”\n\nI cast myself at her feet, I seized her hands, I watered them with tears, I reminded her of all the happy moments we had spent together, I offered to continue my brigand’s life, if that would please her. Everything, sir, everything--I offered her everything if she would only love me again.\n\nShe said: “Love you again? That’s not possible. Live with you? I will not do it.”\n\nI was wild with fury. I drew my knife. I would have had her look frightened and sue for mercy--but that woman was a demon. I cried: “For the last time I ask you, Will you stay with me?”\n\n“No! No! No!” she said and she stamped her foot. Then she pulled a ring I had given her off her finger and cast it into the brushwood. I struck her twice over--I had taken Garcia’s knife because I had broken my own. At the second thrust she fell without a sound. It seems to me that I can still see her great black eyes staring at me. Then they grew dim and the lids closed.--For a good hour I lay there prostrate beside the corpse.’--\n\nNo play-acting could make the scene so pregnant and palpitant with human-stuff and alive in vision as that translucent jewel-prose of Mérimée. But so close as one art may counterfeit another, by drinking-up the fiery spirit essence which informs it, so close did this actor-woman compass and consummate the strong delicious unafraidness of Carmen’s death-hour.\n\nThe scene was staged as in the opera--a court outside the bull-fighting arena, with Carmen richly bejeweled and dressed in the lacy smart-lady clothes of the Toreador’s mistress. But that was nothing. The gypsy wildness of the written scene was in every insolently splendid bodily movement and each fateful loveliness of eyes and lips of the fulfilling Theda Bara.\n\nI can still see the dark drooping-lidded dying eyes. I sensed Carmen in conscious chambers of my Mind. I felt her in my throat. It was Carmen herself living and breathing near me, the fearsomely adorable Carmen who has haunted the edge of my thoughts since I first read her.\n\nThere are some odd crudenesses in Theda Bara’s acting which had the effect of making her un-stagey, unobvious. They made her humanly vibrant. And they added a devilish wistfulness to her Carmen and a surprising feel of genuineness to the whole masque.\n\nThe actor’s art brings out the romance which is in human bone-and-flesh. And Theda Bara seems someway a master of its physical and spiritual subtleties. She expressed the swift emotion of Carmen by ringing slightest possible changes on her own virile and mobile body: insolence by kimboing an elbow: cruelty by the twitch of a wrist: sensual feeling by moving a knee and an ankle: murder in the twisting of her waistline: a fleet repressed animal tenderness by a posture of shoulder and breast: a heartbreak of mirth in her careless vivid lips: the desperate bravery of that death by the tilt of her potent chin: the hurricane-freedom of Carmen’s soul by lifting her face and her arms in the night wind. She worked with an exquisite muscular sincerity, as if she strongly gave her best of brain and blood and mettle to the part.\n\nI looked at photographs of her which decorated the lobby of the theater. She looks a beautiful and earnest-seeming girl of a mental rather than a physical caste, with melancholy dark eyes, a childlike mouth-profile and the slim patrician hands of a Bourbon duchess. She will live in my warmed memory as the star of all the Carmens.\n\nA flood of life and color goes into the staging of a Carmen film: a throng of attractive faces and bodies of people, women and men and lovely children, move through it in a pulsating gay pageant: flowers and Spanish prettinesses of costume and country-side and street and café are all over it, bright as life: and sweet winds blow in it and leaves and grasses wave and flutter, and the sunshine melts and mellows the air--all as if one saw it thrice-enlarged through windows. It is not poetry--it is not in itself any art, but a dear delectable counterfeit of it, a miracle-taste of the outer-looking madly-peopled world.\n\nFor me it meant my long-adored Mérimée given sudden brief life, the haunting Carmen turned into flesh: a spell of silent human-music which glowed and burned upon me like gentle fire.\n\nOften is God thus capriciously kind to me."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "18 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A fascinating creature", "text": "I am a fascinating creature.\n\nI move in no stultifying ruts. There’s no real yoke of custom on my shoulders. My round white breasts beneath their black serge are concurrent with nothing settled or subservient or discreet.\n\nMy Mind goes in no grooves made by other minds. It lives like a witch in a forest, weaving its spells, revelling in smooth vivid adventure. When I look at a round gray stone by a roadside I look at it not as a young woman, not as a person, not as an artist, nor a geologist, nor an economist, but as Me--as Mary MacLane--and as if there had not before been a round gray stone by a roadside since the world began. When I look at a chair with my somber eyes I say to the chair, ‘What other persons may see when they look at you, chair, I don’t know--how could I know? But I well know what I see and that what I see is uninfluenced by other eyes that may have looked at you, were they Aristotle’s or Galileo’s or an archangel’s.’ There may be equally egotistic viewpoints--in Waco-Texas, or Japan, or Glasgow-Scotland or the Orkney Islands, where not? I don’t know--I don’t care. What is it to me? I know my own virile vision and that it thrills and informs and translates me as if crackling bright-jagged lightnings broke along my sky.--\n\nIt is a night of whispering breezes and little restless clouds, an endearing night. It makes solitude a delectation. I walked out in it, in the glimmering moonlight past buildings and houses and mines and mounds. My thoughts as I walked were all of Me: how fascinating is Me.\n\nI came in at midnight and met Me in my mirror. I pushed my three-cornered hat backward off my head, slipped out of my loose coat and dropped my squeezed gloves. I sank fatiguedly into a little chair before the mirror, tipped the chair forward on its front legs, rested my elbows on the bureau and my chin in my hands and looked absorbedly at myself. Lovingly, tenderly, discerningly, marveling and absorbed and deeply fascinated I looked at Me in the mirror. ‘You enchanted one!’ said I, ‘You Witch-o’-the-world! you Mary MacLane!--who you are I don’t know--what you are I but partly know. You’re my Companion, my Familiar, my Lover, my wilding Sweetheart--I love you! I know that--that’s enough. I love your garbled temper, your aching thoughts, your troubled Heart, your wasted spirit. I know much, much, much of you and love you! I love your beauty-sense and your proud scornful secret super-sensitiveness. I love your Eyes and your Lips and your bodily Fire and Ice’--\n\n--to know oneself: apart from all the world!\n\nOne looking at me sees a cold-poised young woman, reserved and aloof, slightly diffusing insolence and inspiring misgivings.\n\nBut I looking at Me see a woman standing high on flame-washed battlements of her life in whom burn and beat the spirits and lights and star-discords of uncounted tired lustrous ages. I see me forlorn and radiant, drab and brilliant. I see me wrapped in a fiery potentiality of pain and beauty and love and sorrow. I hear wild voices in Me like horrid-sweet wailing of ghost-violins, muted but crying loudly in frightful reasonless vital joy and in unspeakable terror and sadness. I see Me ragged-clothed, bleeding, with disordered tangled hair and bloodshot eyes, with coarse soiled hands, broken-nailed, like a criminal’s: a woman of woes. And I see Me wistful in quiet pure garments like one seeking light. I see Me old as old sin and young as new Spring days. I see Me un-sanely sensitive and hardened over--closed in worldly cases: guarded antagonism round my thoughts, protecting indifference round my Heart, dead silence round my Soul. I see Me with brains to know, with prescient mind to grasp, with mobile sense to feel. I see Me all futile, all hopeless, all miserable. I see Me all poetry. I see Me all wonder, mystery and beauty. I see Me!--\n\n--much more than that, this Me sitting here! my deep gray wanton dark eyes: my lips--like pink flowers--with the inscrutable expression: my white fingers--slim, strong, glossy-nailed, silken at the tips. My glass gives Me back to Me, sitting by it, languid of Body, tense of spirit and Mind, bathed in witcheries of Self--\n\nI love my Mary MacLane! Ah--I love her!\n\nIt is good--since I can’t find God, since I can’t find way-of-truth however I grope about.\n\nEvery human friendship I form throws me back more completely on myself.\n\nWhom then shall I love but myself?\n\nI know my own human enchantments and that they never fail me.\n\nI’ll know them more! I’ll love them more!--I’ll love them in sane madness lest mad madness overtake and destroy Me, Soul and bones."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "17 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "No resonance", "text": "My life, myself, I know are nothing noble, nothing constructive.\n\nThere is no resonance in this analysis, but all Dissonance.\n\nSomething lives, lives muscularly in me that constantly betrays me, destroys me against all my own convictions, against all my own knowledge, against all my own desire.\n\nIt may be true of Everybody.\n\nI don’t know. I think about it but get nowhere.\n\nIt seems someway unlike God to make each person a something all of cross-purpose.\n\nBut I doubt that I am different from Everybody.\n\nI doubt if I am anyway abnormal.\n\nI am very sane.\n\nA match-flame burns me the same as it burns Everybody: pins prick me and hurt.\n\nYet I look in myself and see, through harmonic details, the massed Dissonance.\n\nI am dying in a pit."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "3 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Black-browed Wednesdays", "text": "All my life I’ve liked the Back of a magazine.\n\nSome black-browed Wednesday I purchase a magazine, a fifteen-cent one, and read it through. I read the stories and they deeply engage or lightly interest me. I read the ‘special articles’ and if they tell about flying machines or wild birds or hospitals or woman-prisoners in penitentiaries they charm or absorb my thoughts. I look at the illustrations and try to decide whether they are art or science or mechanism. I read the verse and if it’s poetry it exhilarates me as if closed shutters were opened to let Day into a gloomy Room.\n\nThen I read the advertisements in the Back and they do all of those things to me in comforting life-giving oxygen-furnishing ways. Each advertisement is a short story with an eerie little ‘plot’ in it: each is a special article full of purpose: each is fruitful poetry: and in my two hands I all-but have and hold those wonderful Things they exploit.\n\nThey make me feel it’s my birthday and I’m presented a wealth of lavish gifts.\n\nThey make me feel it’s all a world of playthings.\n\nThey make me feel like a baby with a rattle, a ball and a hoop of bells.\n\nI like everything in the Back of a magazine.\n\nI like the Revolvers, handsome plausible short-barreled Revolvers with pictures of ordinary people in dim-lit midnight bedrooms, and ordinary expected-looking burglars climbing in windows--Revolvers of ten shots and of six, and of different calibers, and all of them gleamingly mystically desirable: I like the Soaps, smooth amorous appetizing Soaps, some in luxurious Paris packets, and others spread out in blue water and rosy foam, splashed in by athletic Archimedesque young men and fat creamy babies and slim beautiful ladies--Mary Garden Soap of pungent delicious scent, tar Soap for the long lovely hair of girls, austere Ivory Soap--It floats: I like the Rubber Heels of resilient charm so tellingly pictured and described that at once I desire them beneath my spirit-heels--springy and solid and thick and firm: I like the Tooth-pastes and Tooth-powders and Tooth-lotions in tubes and tins and bottles, each bearing beneficent messages to the human white teeth of this world--one unfailing kind coming lyrically out like a ribbon and lying flat on the brush: I like the foods--of miraculous spotless purity and enticement--Biscuits and Chocolate and Figs, and Foie-gras in thick glossy little pots, so richly pictured and sung that merely to let my thoughts graze in their pasturage fattens my Heart: I like the men’s very thin Watches, and men’s Garters--no metal can touch you--, and men’s fluffy-lathered shaving sticks, and men’s trim smart flawless tailored Suits, in none of which I have use or interest until I find them in the Back of a magazine--where at once they grow charming and romantic: I like the jars and boxes and tubes and glasses of Cold Cream, Cold Cream fit for skins of goddesses, fit for elves to feed on--a soft satiny scented snow-white elysium of wax and vaseline and almond paste, pictured in forty alluring shapes till it feels pleasantly ecstatic just to be living in the same world with bewitching vases of Cold Cream, Cold Cream, Cold Cream--always bewitching and lovely but never so notably and festively as in the Back of a magazine: and I like the Pencils: and Book-cases: and Silver: and Jewels: and Glass: and Gloves: and Shoes--beautiful Shoes: and Fountain-pens: and Leather things: and Paint--silkish salubrious Paints, house-Paints, and the panegyrics with them--they make me long to own a spirit-house and paint it liberally: and Rugs: and Varnish: and Clothes--wonderful Clothes: and Bungalows: and Phonographs--his master’s voice: and Paper--fine-wrought Paper to write on--bond and linen and hand-pressed, pale-tinted--a vast virgin treasure: and Oranges: and Cigarettes--a shilling in London a quarter here: and Water-Bottles of powdery rubber: and Stockings--patrician Stockings which take me into realms of silk-looms and delicate dyes and slim ankles: and Candle-Shades: and Candle-Sticks: and countless Cosmetics--Cosmetics of tender colors for the outer women: and Sealingwax indescribably useless and attractive: and Tennis-Racquets: and Ivory--smooth Vantine Ivory toys and trinkets polished softly bright as moonlight--and their lily-worded descriptions like restrained sonnets: and Washing Powders--let the Gold Dust twins do your work: and Shower-baths: and Evans’ Ale: and Flying Boats: and Umbrellas: and Cameras--if it isn’t an Eastman it isn’t a kodak: and boxes of Candy--sweet wilderness of chocolates--their very makers’ names have a melting gust--Allegretti, Huyler, Clarence Crane, Maillard--cloying courtiers all: and Diamond Dyes--a child can use them: and Veranda Screens--she can look out but he can’t look in: and Cedar Chests: and Chartreuse from Carthusian monasteries: and Perfumes--Perfumes in their maddening-sweet pride, Perfumes from Paris, Perfumes bottled in thick crystal, enchantingly costly--each American dollar added to their price-by-the-ounce making them fragranter to my thoughts: and boxes of benevolent Matches, and captivating Brooms, and fascinating Scouring-powders--a Dutch girl on the can chasing dirt--all three luscious tempting things in the Back of a magazine: and Automobiles--ask the man who owns one: and Rifles--simple and formidable and fine: and restful Rat-poison--they die in the open air seeking water: and sacks of Flour--eventually why not now--flour unusual and piquant in the Back of a magazine, flour novel and endearing: and Type-writers: and Mushrooms: and Monkey-Wrenches: and Rosaries: and Rock-salt--\n\nthe Back, the Back, the Back of a magazine--\n\nThere’s no sadness and no terror in the Back of a magazine.\n\nAnd it is for Everybody, Everybody.\n\nA million people read a story in the middle of the magazine and half the million readily miss its point. But a single tin of Talcum Powder in the Back--the whole million note that and miss nothing in it: it gets to them both on and under their skin.\n\nSome of the million read a ten-line poem in vers libre in the front of the magazine--and nine-tenths of their number are hard-put to it: the mentalities of this human race being mostly shops shut down. It is something pregnant and prophetic to a poet, merely musical to a plain prose writer, arrant folly to a telephone girl, amusing nonsense to a butcher, a comic fantasy to a milliner, a form of insanity to a plumber, an unknown tongue to a milk-man, a kind of sin to a Baptist minister. But to each of those a Can of Soup in the Back of the same magazine has easily, exactly the same ox-tail-ish meanings: it reaches them where they live.\n\nA thousand persons agree with an article about atavism in orang-outangs and ten thousand more quite refute it. But they all harmoniously commit suicide with the same make of Revolver--hammer the hammer--or get rousing drunk to the same degree with the same brand of high-powered whiskey--Wilson, that’s all.\n\nA countess, a courtesan and a convict-woman summarily pass over the front and middle of the magazine as containing nothing to their purpose. But like jungle denizens at their drinking pool the three of them meet hostilely on the common ground of a popular Cigarette featured in the Back--a blend to suit every taste--wherewith they unwittingly smoke away half their generic differentiations. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady anoint themselves nightly into a state of shining invisible kinship from separated twin jars of the same bewitching Cold Cream.\n\nI’m not sure myself and Miss Lily Walker of the Broadway chorus regard similarly a beauteous box of Rice Powder: she perchance would at once dash madly into it and powder herself o’er with it, whereas I would fain ponder about it awhile as a tiny be-violeted adventure. But pondering or powdering, equally exciting to each of us is its delicate pale lilac blazonment in the Back of a magazine.\n\nThe front of the magazine may mean little to you and the middle of the magazine may mean nothing to me: the Back of it none of us escapes.\n\nIt is for Everybody, Everybody.\n\nEven Senegambians: they can look at the pictures and marvel over them.\n\nI can there meet a Senegambian on the common ground of it might be a delicate transparent oval of Pears’ Soap, pretty as a jewel of price: perchance we would each unconsciously feel we wouldn’t be happy till we got it.\n\nIt’s only as playthings I want the Things in the Back of a magazine.\n\nTo me they are toys, lyrics of matter, food of the senses.\n\nThe octroi would have no sympathy with my loiterings among their wares. It is a fête of my own, indolent and fanciful, unrecognized in commerce. Any article I may put to its forthright use in actuality becomes an idyllic toy when I find it in the Back of a magazine. The desirable Revolvers are not firearms with which to shoot myself and burglars, but only bijous to have and handle and caress. The luxuriant vervain- and violet-scented Soaps are not for my toilet, but something to eat, for my astral body to feed on--nourishing food they make. The lush Cold Creams have no massaging possibilities in them--they are for my thoughts to gambol among, for my meddlesome spirit-fingers to touch and fuss with deliciously, blissfully, transcending all vulgar use. The men’s thin Watches mean nothing to me as Watches: and their Garters--what’s it to me whether no-metal-can-touch-you or no-metal-at-all? My thoughts merely revel and juggle with them, picture and legend--they are pastimes of my child-self. The cream-woven Note Papers are not to write on but wherewithal to imagine how cool and smooth they would feel drawn slowly across my flushed cheek. A sack of Flour--I feel only how I’d like to have it spilled out--eventually-why-not-now--in a thick warm-tinted heap on the blue-velvety floor of my room that I might roll and bathe in it and feel it feathery-fluffy on my skin.\n\nSo I play with my toys on black-browed Wednesdays.\n\nSome Wednesdays even fail to be black-browed because there are Backs to magazines."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "9 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The conscious analyst", "text": "I don’t know whether I write this because I wear two plain dresses or whether I wear two plain dresses because I write it.\n\nMy life fell into a lowering mood which calls for but two dresses: which mood compels me to write out these things that are in me as inevitably as heavy gathered clouds come raining to the ground. The mood having overtaken me I can not keep from writing this day after day, more than I can keep from brushing my hair every day, and eating lumps of food every day, and picking up tiny white specks from my blue rug.\n\nI love this book and I fear and hate it. I love the writing of it though it is a finical unobvious task--more so than it looks. And often I fear to read it over lest I hurt my own feelings. And I hate it in ways. I am a particularly sane woman when all’s said. And many things I come to in me are grating and inexplicable and incongruous.\n\nBut also I love it. It is my companion ‘when the world is gone.’ I am as solitary as if I had no human place in this earth. My days are as silent as if I lived in it alone. The few voices that bespeak me in a day or a week stop at my ear-drums and are immensely alien. At times, for weeks on end, I am quite alone in this house and the silence then has a depth and a hollowness. From it I feel not alone in a house but alone in a world: and more when the family is in the house.\n\nAnd it is what-should-I-do if I had not a writing talent to expend me upon from day to day, and so rest me. I feel God around some corner but that feeling is no rest, but only an odd terror which wants the dignity of terror.\n\nTimes I wonder if I shall have this published afterward for all to read and if so what colors it will paint on my world--and what else may befall.\n\nBut it’s an aspect dim and remote now. I wearing but two nunlike dresses and face to face with me, have nothing to do with publishing books and with the beautiful noisy world and its befallings. It is easy to believe I shall never again have to do with any of that. This may be my death-mood. I am very tired. The weight of being a person is heavy on me as weights of lead. And still I know if I suddenly bloomed with beautiful frocks and went out to-morrow to lose myself among people, people, people I should at once achieve a veneer of the utmost frivol. I have an odd frivolous quality full of an ardor and strength, with all of my mental mettle in it. Also I know if I did that now it would be but postponing this analytic reckoning. Which would confront me again with the more rancor, the more futileness gathered into it from having been put off.\n\nThis book and the two dresses are my present portion. If I could escape them (I am not quite sure I want to--but--hell!)--it would be of no use. They would come back again in an unexpected ripeness of time and demand a hearing: an exquisite nervous tragic hearing.\n\nThey are such stuff as the conscious analyst is made of.\n\nBut though I’m the conscious analyst I can’t quite tell whether I write the book because I wear two plain black dresses or I wear those because I write it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "15 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Eye when I mean tooth", "text": "I write it, and it’s a surprising book.\n\nIt is not what on the surface it looks to be.\n\nI do not write what my clear Mind may want to say to the white blank paper.\n\nI do not write what my thoughts are saying to me.\n\nThose things are facile, uninformed--flat mental pictures, the writer’s craft.\n\nI write what still voices of life: voices trivially frightful in their secret pettiness: voices of all my life--merest living--say to my ancient Soul and my young present Body and what they two may answer.\n\nI am in some sort a wonderful person--and in places I do that, nearly perfectly.\n\nI am also tired and someway whelmed by self-conscious despair, and possessed of a talent imperfect and inadequate to reveal the radiances and shades my being perceives: and in places I fail.\n\nI fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood. For no better reason than that my writing hand is not sufficiently dexterous: the little flashing shutters open and shut so quick that the second ones are shut and the third starting to open before I have got written the things I saw through the first ones.\n\nOnly not always."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "7 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A wild mare", "text": "Also I am dissatisfying to myself.\n\nMy thoughts smother me: they keep me from life.\n\nI am a hundred times more introspective than most people, most women. Most women, even conventional ones, are lawless--the more conventional, the more lawless usually.\n\nAnd so most women beat me to life. Where they yield to an impulse the moment they feel it--I, because an impulse itself is adventure-fabric--I feel of its quality, test it for defects, wash a little corner of it to see if the color will run--and conclude not to use it.\n\nThat I gaze inward at the garbled biograph of Me keeps me from several sorts of violent action.\n\nI have violent action in me, chained in analysis.\n\nMost women are secretly lawless on the old plan inaugurated by Eve--of inclining to do anything forbidden, of hugging everything they are unsupposed to hug, of determinedly kicking over the traces when coerced too much. The ban is the chief attraction.\n\nIt’s but little like that with me. There would be point and purpose in my Action. But it is kept in stupor by analysis.\n\nI am malcontent about that, though I live upon analysis. I hate the inaction and inertia that follow on its heels.\n\nI could be an anarchist. I condemn anarchists but not as I condemn Me. I would respect me more were I this moment prisoned in a real bastile for having stuck a good knife into a bad king. I could feel, no matter how foolish and mistaken in itself the act, that I had done the strong and brave thing at sacrifice of my personal selves. The dry living-death of the prison would be compensated for each day when I said to Me, ‘It was a needful honorable act and I did it: for once in my life I was a Regular Person.’\n\nThere would be a nourishment in being able to tell that to myself. There would be warming food in owning one so brave remembrance of myself.\n\nBut, my Soul-and-bones!--at the very moment of lifting the good knife a thought would come: ‘How is this king worse than another? What rotten rascal mightn’t rise in his place?’ And on with a lightning-trail of analysis till my pale hand dropped inert and the knife in it grew harmless as a lily-petal.\n\nIt isn’t that I haven’t the guts. I have.\n\nI am a wild mare in foal: and unfoaling."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "23 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The mist", "text": "Because I am to myself someways dissatisfying and exasperating often this thing I write is dissatisfying and exasperating.\n\nIt is a true account of what is inside me. ‘The wine must taste of its own grapes.’\n\nIt would be easier to make it an untrue account, for fiction is the most effortless of writing. So I have found it. And I am very clever.\n\nI could write myself as a pretty dainty harmlessly purring one--the leopard with claws clipped and fangs drawn.\n\nWhen my dynamos rest I am like that, doubtless.\n\nBut the wears and tears of breathing and the influences of varied life-details and of clothes worn and food eaten start me moving devilishly.\n\nPhases of a score of persons, men and women, come to light in me.\n\nTo be one human being means to be monstrously mixed.\n\nI write me out not as I might be, nor as I should be--whatever that may be--: but merely as I am.\n\nAs, Just Beneath The Skin, I am.\n\nSo my written account must come out someways dissatisfying and exasperating. Logically dissatisfying and divinely and ethically exasperating.\n\n--a passage in Vergil tells of a Mist that is all over and about this world from the human ‘tears that are falling, falling, falling always.’ Something, and it may be that Mist, makes one’s view of everything--everything in life--a little blurred. It may even blur one’s view of oneself. So it may be I do not see myself with entire clearness--\n\nI only know I write me as clearly as I see me, considering the Mist."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "15 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A white liner", "text": "To-day came the Finn woman and cleaned my blue-and-white bedroom.\n\nShe comes now and again and cleans excellently.\n\nI would like to clean my room myself but lack the strength and skill to do it well.\n\nBut I stay with the Finn woman and show her how and I watch her work and muse upon her. She would be called in England a charwoman, but in this America of the vast mongrel heterogenesis she is an unclassified laborer.\n\nI like to watch her and talk with her a bit and dwell on her mixed potentialities. She contrasts fascinatingly with me.\n\nShe is a human being and so am I, and beyond and with that there are odd parallels and similarities and distinctions between her and me.\n\nHer name is Josephina and she looks as if it might be.\n\nMine is Mary MacLane but I don’t look entirely like it.\n\nShe lives a lonely life and so do I, differing in sort and circumstance.\n\nI am middle-class and American of Canadian reminiscence, and early-thirty.\n\nJosephina is Finn and lower-class with a ‘foreign’ look, and she is forty-five and looks sixty and is twelve years out of Finland.\n\nI am tallish and slim and weigh nine wavering stone.\n\nThe Finn woman is short and solid and weighs all of a hundred and seventy pounds.\n\nI am slender of flank and ankle, narrow through the loins and bony at the shoulders.\n\nThe Finn woman is thick everywhere, broad of girth and deep of chest like a Percheron stallion.\n\nI am darkish with dusky gray eyes.\n\nJosephina is dirty-blond with pale narrow blue eyes like a china doll’s.\n\nMy sex feels to me like a mysterious sweetness.\n\nJosephina’s sex looks porcinely obvious and uninteresting like her large dubious breasts.\n\nI am inwardly full of strong-flavored emotions.\n\nThe one positive outward feeling Josephina manifests is a dull but comprehensive hatred, peculiar to her nationality and station, for everything Swedish.\n\nThe Finn woman has a husband now and had a different one formerly.\n\nI have none and never had.\n\nJosephina is elemental primeval woman.\n\nSo am I but terrifically qualified by complexity, incongruity.\n\nI have white smooth firm beautiful hands.\n\nJosephina’s hands are particularly ugly and have a menacing look.\n\nI have quick intelligence.\n\nJosephina is markedly stupid.\n\nI live in a quiet clean bungalow.\n\nJosephina lives in an unusually filthy unrestful little house.\n\nI own two dresses whose personnel alters at intervals.\n\nJosephina owns one unchanging dress, septic, maculate and repellent.\n\nI have a sense of humor vivid and intriguing to myself.\n\nJosephina has no more sense of humor than a flatiron.\n\nI bathe foamily icily each morning.\n\nJosephina would seem never to have had a bath. She cleans windows and floors and rugs for thirty-five cents an hour. She would regard it as a fantastic waste of time and soap to clean herself for nothing.\n\nI own in a still flawed life one phase which is an endless treasure of beauty and power and charm and light: my love for John Keats.\n\nThe Finn woman owns about the same thing in a life which may be more still and flawed than mine: her love for strong drink.\n\nThere begins a curious line of similitude between us.\n\nI feel oddly joyous and light of heart on a solitary veranda corner with the John-Keats poetry book open in my lap.\n\nAnd Josephina has been found many a time by Butte policemen sitting alone joyous and very drunk, in dark alleys with empty pint bottles strewn all about her.\n\nIn my un-Keats hours I am mostly mournful. And Josephina sober has all the melancholy of her race with an added gloom, as if the acetylene had run out of all her lamps. That my melancholy is more lustrous than hers I lay to her native dullness as against my native braininess, and to alcohol’s having rotting effects on human mental tissues: whilst John Keats to those who drink his poetry is a starry savior.\n\nI like to think there’s the same ambrosial food in the Demon Rum for Josephina as in the Grecian Urn for me.\n\nThere seems no other pleasure in life for her.\n\nThe limit of her literary pursuit is the reading of a four-page Finnish newspaper full of obituaries.\n\nThe opalescent enchantments of her inner being mean nothing to her: she wouldn’t know her entity from her duodenum.\n\nHer body can bring her no delight: there’s no lightness to it, no tang, no feminine charm, no consciousness to make her love it as the Dianas love theirs.\n\nA sunset above the western peaks is less than a setting sun to her.\n\nHer food is merely her fodder.\n\nLove and Romance pass her by. She and the husband vie with each other for solitary possession of their little nasty house. And her personality is not conducive to lovers.\n\nShe has nor chick nor child to mother.\n\nHer idea of a life beyond this vale is crude and uncomfortable. She went two Sundays to the Finnish church and had a surprising lusty doctrine of eternal fire rammed down her throat: she took the Finn minister’s word for it and quitted the fold, preferring to live this life unhampered by flaming anticipation. All her material treasure she works for with mops and scrubbing-brushes at thirty-five cents an hour.\n\nOther roads being thus blocked it is sing-ho for King Alcohol in pint bottles.\n\nJosephina is what is called a white liner. Which means that she has drunk so long, so much, so regularly that whiskey, rum, gin and brandy have no or negligible effects upon her. To achieve her intoxicating aim she must drink pure alcohol.\n\nBy the same token I eschew many a tame poet: I must have John Keats.\n\nWhat the poetry of John Keats does to me I know.\n\nWhat the distilled waters of her choice do to Josephina it pleases me to imagine while I watch her clean my walls and floor and windows.\n\nShe works strongly, steadily, quietly till I pronounce the room clean. Then she stops, carries the pails and other things downstairs to the kitchen, removes a big brass pin from the rear of her dingy skirt which had held it back and doubled over her darkling petticoat, re-dons an antique rain-coat and bad hat, ties her clinking silver into the corner of a decadent handkerchief, bids me good-evening with a grave blond Finn bow and goes out into the dusk. She takes her way through alleys and short-cuts to the side door of a ‘Finlander’ gin-palace in the Finn quarter of the town. And there she lays out her day’s wage in the pint bottles of her delight. As many pint bottles as her few dollars will buy, so many she buys. She ventures her all in the name of passionate thirst taking no thought of the morrow. She then seeks out some alley with a dark door-step and there she does her drinking. It would not do to go home with her alcoholic wealth because the husband might be there who, like the alphabetic vintner, would ‘drink all himself.’ So she drinks away in pint-bottle-ish peace, sitting alone in the gloom of the alleyway door-step, in her limp rain-coat and bad hat and her stolid Finn self-sufficience.\n\nBecause I like Josephina it charms me to think of the happiness that must be hers as she sits emptying pint bottles into herself and the white strong fire-water begins to work.\n\nBefore having her drinks she is unelated and uninformed like a corpse coldly electrified by a storage battery. As she drinks and drinks on she remains outwardly unchanged as the way is with her race--but within! The changes that come to pass in the heavy person of Josephina as the white flames wash down her walls!\n\nInto her dull veins pours a hot stream like melted seething copper and it heats her knees till she knows she has knees and that they are white and very beautiful: and it heats her legs and her back and her breasts till they glow with the double-glow of an Aphrodite’s in a reluctant Adonis’s arms: it heats her eyes and temples and throat till she feels herself a radiant girl: it heats the crown of her head till she feels something like a brain there: it heats her heart and stomach till she’s filled with a gay gust for life: it heats her imagination till she even imagines herself in love with her hard Finn husband since he is not by to beat her and so dispel the fancy: it heats a sense of humor into her till she laughs suddenly and heartily at some fugitive funniness that had lain long frozen in her memory: it heats a hundred little human carburetors in her which send a wreathe of vapors up into her drab being to flush it with misty golds and thin blues and rosy crimsons till her dormant involuntary soul awakes--a thing of old mellowed beauty, it may be--and is wafted on warm pretty vapory wings far from alleys, far from mops and scrubbing-brushes, far from thirty-five cents an hour, far from doorsteps--to fair sweet Isles of the Blest!\n\nNearing the last of her pint bottles she reels sideways on the doorstep: her bad hat cants forward: she sprawls about. The policeman on that beat to whom in that aspect she is a figure long familiar strolls toward her late in the night and looks at her with a lackluster eye. But Josephina is physically unaware of all this world. Her last pint bottle is gamely emptied, her inner sun’s chromosphere burns like mad--but her body, unable to cope with the virile delectations new-risen within it, limply gives way.\n\nA quaint picture, interesting to dwell on: her thick bathless body laid low in the darkened alley, with the empty pint bottles scattered on the paving-stones beside it--but her astral shape, lit by the subtle fires of alcohol, lifted high, high to remote elysiums. The policeman calls the ‘wagon’ and Josephina is taken up by several ungentle hands and tossed into it like a sack of coal. They take her to the city jail and lock her in a cell. The next morning she stands jaded and morbidly intoxicated before a police judge who glances at her uninterestedly for the several-hundredth time and says five days.\n\nThe five days can not be pleasant days but Josephina owns a robust sporting spirit. She gives not so much as the shrug of a shoulder either at going into jail or coming out of it. A black eye from her husband, a broken arm from a drunken fall, a filthy sojourn in jail: all one to her. She accepts them as she accepts all of her life, with an immense psychic calm. But she takes strongly to drink to translate herself out of it. And let her drink.\n\nI know how she feels for I take to John Keats. I don’t myself care much for strong drink. I drink a little of it at irregular intervals, but, by and large, I drink without éclat. In this mountain altitude whiskey makes me sick, champagne makes me dizzy and gin is a pungent punishment. One morning after reading of Josephina’s white-line distinction in a police-court column I tasted some alcohol, but it had a varnish flavor and had strangling effects on my throat. It made me marvel at Josephina’s prowess. I like absinthe in its bitter strength mostly because to sit sipping it feels restfully forbidden. Port wine is a brackish medicine, I hate the stickiness of cordials, and a cocktail I like chiefly to contemplate. So much for me and strong drink.\n\nJosephina on the other hand does not care for John Keats. I sounded her on poetry in some of its human aspects: there was nobody at home. Her own enlightened north country has some poets of borealic iron and brain-brawn and beauty: to Josephina’s wooden intellect their books are eternally closed.\n\nBut the Demon Rum looses a heated flood of poetry upon her, which I can but vision and not feel.\n\nI am incapable of strong drink even as Josephina is incapable of John Keats.\n\nWe are quits there.\n\nI look on myself as the more fortunate.--John Keats!\n\nA woman so drunk as to fall and reel about is always an exquisitely shameful thing. And when I think of how she’s tossed into the wagon--to mention but one item--\n\nBut it’s a matter of the human equation. Doubtless it is all relative. The Finn woman is not aware of how she is knocked about, and if she were she would not regard it with any of my imagination. So what matter?\n\nA likeable and admirable person is Josephina. A so strong fine businesslike worker, a so thoroughbred sport, a so splendid drunkard, and asking no odds of God or man. In her stolid Finn fashion she likes me as she has proven, and I like her though she makes me feel inferior.\n\n--if Josephina could and would write her inner isolated world of thoughts--the saga of her one horrid gown! There would be a book. All blacks and carmines--all stolidly sober and brilliantly drunk--all dingily bathless: deeply savagely quietly human.\n\nIt would be a book savoring not of white alcohol but of the salty unshed Tears, the dry artistic Griefs of Josephina."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "7 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Beneficent bedlam", "text": "I have been so long Sane it would be gay and sweet and resting to go Mad.\n\nI would I could go Mad.\n\nTo a Mad-woman a Door is not a Door, probably: a Cat is not a Cat, belike: and To-morrow is not To-morrow at all--it may be week-before-last, it may be next year, it may be an exquisite jest. One can not tell what it is.\n\nIt is the thing one escapes by going Mad: Monotony.\n\nIt’s all beneficent bedlam."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "27 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A deathly pathos", "text": "I love the sex-passion which is in this witching Body of me. I love to feel its portent grow and creep over me, like a climbing vine of tiny red roses, in the occasional dusks.\n\nIt is no shame or shadow or sordidness: but beauty and sweetness and light.\n\nno token of sin: a token of virtue.\n\nno thing to crush: rather to nurture, to garner.\n\nno thing to forget: to remember, to think about.\n\nno flat weak drawn-out prose: live potent clipped heated poetry.\n\nnot common and loosely human: rare and divine.\n\nnot fat daily soup: stinging wine of life.\n\nnot valueless because born of nothing and nowhere: valuable, priceless, a treasure under lock and key.\n\nSex-desire comes wandering in dusk-time and gulfs me as in a swift violent sweet-smelling whirlwind. It goes away sudden-variant as it came, out of a region of hot quick shadows.\n\nAnd for that, for hours and days afterward, oranges and apples look brighter-colored to my eyes: hammocks swing easier as I sit in them: rugs feel softer to my feet: the black dresses lend themselves gentler to my form: pencils slide faciler on paper: my voice speaks less difficultly into telephones: meanings sound super-vibrant in Keats’s Odes: sugar--little pinches of granulated sugar--are shaper, sweeter-sweeter in my throat.\n\nAnd God grows less remote. And my wooden coffin and deep wet yellow clay grave move a long way back from me.\n\n--all from fleeting ungratified wish of sly sex-tissues--\n\nAlso in it, and in my life from it, I sense some deathly pathos."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "23 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The necklace", "text": "The Necklace which God long ago hung round the white neck of my Soul is composed of little-seeming curses, like precious and semi-precious gems. They are polished smooth as if by age, as if by wear, as if by fingering and as if by brisk industrious rubbing.\n\nThe Necklace is at once beautiful and ugly. The gems are in color chiefly blues and greens--with grays, lavenders, drabs and mauves. But mostly blues and greens. They make a circlet of small stones strung at short intervals as if on a strong thin gold wire, with two large tawdry pretty pendants hung in front. One of the pendants is my fertile phase of Weakness and the other my odd encompassing Folly. The smaller stones are seventeen in number and their names and natures are these:\n\nthe first is Dishonesty which makes ghosts of half my life.\n\nthe second is Pretense, hard and genuine stone, which keeps me from being all-ways sincere even to anyone who knows me and whom I know: who loves me and whom I love.\n\nthe third is Fear which makes me who scorn all leonine dangers cringe and crawl for Trifles of life incredibly little.\n\nthe fourth is Sensuality which burns and bursts across my Mind, half-missing my Body.\n\nthe fifth is Anxiety, strange flawed green stone--by it I worry, tortured and wildly wavering, about the passing hours of my life: where they are going, where they are taking me.\n\nthe sixth is Amativeness, extraordinary deep-tinted warm false gem--it makes me love someway amorously some person I meet and fancy: an intimate tragedy, crucial and trivial.\n\nthe seventh is Fatigue of the spirit itself, gray sad stone, meaning terrible sensations of age in my young flesh.\n\nthe eighth is Incongruity, the sense and feeling of it, round blue stone--it kills what might be art and constructiveness and excellence in me.\n\nthe ninth is Acquiescence, worn dull stone--it has kept me all the ages from the salvation of heated luminous strife.\n\nthe tenth is Sensitiveness, pale-toned stone--by it the fingers of life touch me too suddenly, too sharply, too tensely to do me the good they might.\n\nthe eleventh is Doubt, frail opalescent stone--by it my delight in the sunny Spring wind against my cheek is qualified with dubious surprise: by it I half-disbelieve in moon and stars and in long country roads stretched out solitary, lovely, drenched in sunset.\n\nthe twelfth is Self-consciousness, blue-and-green stone--it robs me of the comfort and self-respect of feeling any motive in me to be un-ulterior.\n\nthe thirteenth is Introspection, beautiful-beautiful blue-green stone--it pays for its place in beauty but by it I lose the building, the substance, the matter of living.\n\nthe fourteenth is Intensity--too vivid vision, too vivid taste for some details of life--little hot-looking cool-feeling stone--by it I undervalue and overvalue, dwell upon surfaces, missing the serene feel and possession of precious solidness.\n\nthe fifteenth is Isolation, pale purple stone--it makes me feel never at home, never at ease, never belonging--a subtle insulation--in this sheltered peopled world.\n\nthe sixteenth is Bewilderment, mixed-tinted stone--by it I wonder what is truth with truth seeming that moment fluttering soft-plumed wings at my throat.\n\nthe seventeenth is--it has no name--the Feel-of-Me, bright blue-green stone, lovely and loathesome--by it I’ve lost my way, I’ve felt all and only Me when I might have groped outward, hand and foot, and found a wind-swept path to go in: I was always blurred by Me.\n\nA small Necklace, all dull gleams and unusual tints, strung finely and strongly and beautifully on shining gold. The sweet Soul droops like a wilted lily under even its slight weight. Strong fine rivets hold it firm-clasped and the weight of the two charming imitation pendant-stones keep it gracefully in place. My loved and lovely Soul has worn it through the ages: manacle, shackle.\n\nHow long more--God may know but does not tell me.\n\nIt’s only a Necklace. And my Soul is a Soul!\n\nEven under the frail galling burden of the flesh the Soul of me to-morrow could tear off that Necklace and crumble it to airless nothing.\n\nIt does not: but could."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "18 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Slyly garbling and cross-purposing", "text": "At rarish intervals comes my Soul to visit me.\n\nMy Soul is light sheer Being.\n\nMy Soul is like a young most beautiful girl marked and worn by long cycles of time but not anyway aged. She comes dressed in something like gray-white de-soie muslin or fine-grained crêpe silk, a loose-belted frock reaching to her ankles.\n\nMy Soul is unmoved by the world and the flesh and their feeling, as befits a Soul. She looks on me with a chill faëry-ish contempt, as also befits a Soul. The quality of her contempt is of weary understanding and is like a caress.\n\nIn the dusk of yesterday came my Soul to visit me--a dusk of a deep beauty. The last glow of the sun lay along the earth, and all was gentian blue.\n\nI leaned against my window-pane watching it, and beside me sat her Presence. Her Presence makes me feel wonderfully gifted: it is mine, this Soul all Golden-Silk and Silken-Gold!\n\nWe talk on many topics, of many things: I in worldly nervous ignorance and with a wishfulness to reach and compass and know: the Soul with poise and surety of attitude, a wearied patience and the chill sweet contempt.\n\nShe answers me from her cool old tranquil viewpoint, which is near me yet remote.\n\nWe talked last of some bygone persons I have been, some shapes she wore.\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘Early in the sixteenth century you were a ragged Russian peasant girl living in ignorance and filth in a hut by a swamp-edge. You had parents both of whom beat your body black-and-blue from your babyhood. And at eighteen you were a coarsened hardy wench tending a drove of pigs and goats on the sunny steppe. I was there with you as presently as now--as sentient, as perceptive. But it is a question whether you or the little beasts you drove were the more beastly stupid. You and they were equal in outer quality, equal in uncleanliness, equally covered with vermin.’\n\nI have no ghost-memory of that time, but as the Soul told of it a nascent feeling came on me, as if some part of my Mind felt its way back to that. I warmed to the thought of the Peasant Girl. I was quiescent to her filth and ignorance.\n\nSaid I: ‘Was she brave and fairly honest?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You were a ready liar--you lied your way out of many a beating. But you were brave enough. You faced the roughnesses of your life uncringing, and you died game.’\n\nSaid I: ‘How did I die?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You were run neatly through the body by the short sword of a soldier whose lust-desire you had had the hardihood to refuse--and I fled away upon the instant.’\n\nSaid I: ‘I half-knew it--she died a violent death. You--were you glad to be quit of her filthy flesh, her surroundings, her ignorance?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘Glad? Such things mean nothing to me. Your body, be it sweet or foul, has no bearing on my long journey. Motives--motif--back of your human acts make me glad or sorry at leaving you.’\n\nSaid I: ‘Tell me about a time when I seemed someway fine, humanly fine.’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘In London, near the end of the seventeenth century, before and during the period of the Gordon Riots, you lived in a way of peace. From when you were fourteen until you were twenty-nine you lived alone with your little lame half-sister whom you cared for very devotedly, very tenderly.’\n\nMy little half-sister-- Until the Soul spoke of her there was no vision, no image like her. Then something of me remembered.\n\nSaid I: ‘What was she like? Who were our parents?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘Your mother died at your birth, hers at her birth. Your father was hanged at Tyburn for forgery. The sister was pale, large-eyed, long-haired, crippled from a dislocated shoulder and hip. When you were twenty-five she was eleven, a beautiful frail child. You lived in two rooms above a linen-draper’s and you supported the two of you by weaving and calendering cloths for the shop-keeper, and by illuminating missals and manuscripts when you could get that work. For a very poor wage, but living was cheap. All the time you took zealous care of your sister. Your heart was bound up in her--you adored her.’\n\nSaid I: ‘I know that. Tell me what we did--how we lived--how we loved each other.’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘In the summer evenings you often walked out along quiet London streets--the sister sometimes with a crutch and your arm about her, sometimes in a rolling chair, whilst you walked beside her pushing it. Your father had educated you in an erratic fashion. You had a deal of desultory knowledge--what is called knowledge--and you educated the young sister in the same manner. Often it was of the poets--Latin, English, Italian, and of histories and sciences and arts--what odd comprehensive bits you knew--that you two talked as you sauntered in the bright late English sunlight. Or you talked of the little details of your joint life. Sometimes you sat together--you holding her close in your arms--by a window in your darkening front room, and watched the children at play in the common opposite, and conversed and were quietly happy. You were maternal and the child was a mature old-fashioned yet childish innocent child.’\n\nMy little sister--sweet--long gone-- Would that I had her now!\n\nSaid I: ‘Tell me what we said.’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You said to her, “Our poverty and even our deprivations, dearest, which for your sake I feel deeply would not matter, not the least, to me if I could see you well and strong.” And the child replied, “Sweet, just to rest like this in your arms each twilight makes me rich, rich--as rich as the smartest ladies in Piccadilly.” And you said, “Rich reminds me, Darling, we shall have four extra shillings--four bright silver shillings--at the end of this week from the book-seller. So what shall we purchase for a treat? There’ll be, if you like, prawns and crumpets for tea, for days to come--or if my Child prefers oranges or pineapples once--” And the child replied with her cheeks quite pink at the thought, “O Sister-love, let us have the pines, just one day, and let us make-believe to be ladies that day, and comport ourselves like ladies, and take our tea--all like ladies.” And you pressed her close to your breast--you both wore caps and kerchiefs and stuff-gowns in the fashion of the lower-middle artisan class--and showered gentle kisses on her cheeks and eyelids, and promised her the pineapples and the tea like ladies.’\n\nI listened to this with vivid still pleasure. It felt like endearing fulfilling life--a day of tenderness--. And oddly familiar.\n\nSaid I: ‘What were we in the habit of having for our tea--that prawns and crumpets would make us a treat?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘Your tea was chiefly bran-bread and cress or perhaps lettuce, with a stone mug of milk for the child when you could afford it. The London of that day had no luxuries for the poor. And having had none you missed none. But the populace lived in starveling misery. The rabble rose and rallied to the Gordon as it would have to anyone who urged it to rioting. You were Protestants but you regarded him as a weakling visionary. You watched the rioting in the streets with little fear, but the linen-draper and all other shop-keepers kept barred doors. You two were venturesome and were yourselves of the masses, and when the mob stormed Newgate prison you both stood watching with many other householders on the outskirts of the crowd, in terror but secretly half in sympathy. You were safe enough from the rioters who were intent on wrecking the gaol and freeing the inmates. It was characteristic of you as you were then to be out looking on at a murderous night scene with interest, carefully protecting the child from contact with the throngs.’\n\nSaid I: ‘How long did that life last?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘Four years after that your sister changed from her bare little bed to a coffin and you went on alone achingly suffering her loss for long years. You lived to be seventy, a thin old woman, working latterly as one of the night nurses in a public hospital. You lived an abstemious outwardly self-sacrificing life and died alone, from hardened arteries, one autumn night.’\n\nSaid I: ‘And was there an informing beauty for you, for you and for me, in my life then?’\n\nColdly said the Soul: ‘You were self-centered, for all your self-sacrifice. You reckoned it your duty to care for your sister. It was also your irresistible delight. And after her death you took self-satisfaction in self-sacrifice: smug--smug. For me there was a laming distortion in it all.’\n\nSaid I: ‘Tell me some other life.’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You were once a little thief in the streets of a later London. You picked pockets, you stole bits of food in Covent Garden market, you pilfered shop-tills, you systematically worked the wealthy throngs as they came from the Opera at midnight. You were known to the police as the cleverest child-thief in London.’\n\nIt warmed my vanity to think of myself as clever in so theatric a rôle as thief.\n\nSaid I: ‘How did that life like you?’\n\nSaid the Soul, with a shrug of her delicate shoulders: ‘I had little to do with it and that in a negative way. My part in you was to keep up your heart in hungry hunted days. You were neither a good thing nor a bad thing: perishingly passive. And you were dead in a potter’s field before your sixteenth birthday.’\n\nSaid I: ‘How did the little Thief look?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You were sufficiently ugly--an undersized form, a gamin face, bastard features.’\n\nSaid I: ‘And I daresay ignorant?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘Ignorant of everything rated useful, but wise to the under-sides of human nature and in the sordid viciousness of London slums. And singularly shrewd--what is called philosophical.’\n\nSaid I: ‘Pray tell me another life.’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘An earlier time--Paris, some century before the Terror saw you a slim fille-du-pavè, a prostitute of a low cheap type, but with more brain, more of what is termed character than you have ever possessed. You had wit, will, esprit, determination. From having been at seventeen most obscenely of the streets you were at thirty a wonderfully grand courtesan: no better in what are called morals but possessed of very much inner and outer strength and luster. You were chère-aimèe to men of brain, men of importance to the state, whose acts were shaded by your influence. And you achieved unusual wealth chiefly by the powers and strategies of your character. You lived in the extreme of luxury of that time and of your type--a delicate luxury, almost high-bred. You were wanton in amour, being physically extremely passionate, but admirably straightforward and strong in each matter and aspect of your life.’\n\nSaid I: ‘You admired her?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘I was serene and vividly alive within you. You were in all ways, simply and completely, an honest woman, and for the only time.’\n\nSaid I: ‘How could she be honest, since she lived by exchanging treasure of much personal economic value for cheap cheapest gold, trash, and a besmirched name: and all through two sorts of greed?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You were honest since you made no pretense of any kind to yourself. You took no gold that you did not logically, humanly or shamefully earn. You were consciously and unconsciously above all subterfuge. You wrought no ruin nor error nor darkness upon your own spirit or any other. You deceived neither yourself nor anyone about you. The tone of your life was of sun-shining simplicity and cleanness. There was no greed in you. You saw your way of life before you and lived it without degradation, with a positiveness of strength.’\n\nIt is as if my Soul’s view and mine were infinitely separate from being narrowly paralleled. The portrait was mystically familiar: but not by her light.\n\nSaid I: ‘Was she beautiful to look at?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You were beautiful in a pallid saintlike French manner--an uncertain type of beauty which fatigue or depression turns to plainness. You had but little light charm of prettiness. But you had what counts for more than beauty: the nerve and verve of attractiveness, the force and fascination of physical being, the fragrance, the flair of the deeply-sexed woman. In one phase you were constantly preying and preyed upon, but with high valors of attack and endurance.’\n\nSaid I: ‘Did she live in peace--had she no times of suffering?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You had hours of violent bitter suffering. Paris has always accepted without countenancing the properous cocotte. And often you were infamously insulted at street-crossings by soldiers and sergeants-de-ville as you drove out in your small bright-colored carriage. And you were hailed with opprobrious appropriate names by the ragged populace as they picked up silver pieces which you threw among them. Such things were stinging brands and lashes to you. But you bore yourself with entire courage. You gave much money to churches and charities but looked on such acts in yourself rightly as some slight weakness which would, however, be of benefit to the starving poor. I can not describe--so you could grasp it--the peace, the expansion, the freedom for me in that life and in that attitude.’\n\nThe exact outlook of the Soul throws over me a veil of wistfulness, bewilderness, freedness, lostness which hides the material moorings of my life and casts me adrift on broad clouded seas.\n\nSaid I: ‘What was the end of that--how did she die?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You died exquisitely, of syphilitic disorders. You were something past forty, badly broken--your looks were gone, your friends were gone, your money was not gone but it was of little use to you. But you smiled serenely and lived up personally and mentally to your smile. A surgeon and a fat mustached old woman saw you die in the beginning of that bodily rot--the just portion of the passionate whore--one sweet Spring dawn, with birds twittering in green branches outside your window and a great gold sun slowly breaking the mist. Then for once I left you with reluctance. I clung to you. The kiss of me was last on your fainting brain and your fast-cooling heart. For I was leaving, in an agony of my own, an honest person. And I knew not what might be my next petty prison.’\n\nSaid I: ‘What was my next life?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘It was not so petty as were some others. You were next--about seventeen-fifty--a quaint extremely common little person. You were apprenticed as a child to a milliner in Liverpool, England. You grew out of that and became a dancer in a dingy theatre--a cheap bedraggled life. You were a cheap and bedraggled young woman. You wore odd gay tawdry frocks, hideous little shoes, ragged raveled silk hose, surprising bright bonnets. Your mind was a shallow pool filled with tales from shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls in which you believed implicitly. You were mentally degenerate, organically a fool, a wonderful snob. You wanted only wealth and place bitterly to deride and browbeat the low class to which you belonged--not from lack of heart but because you believed it to be the proper aristocratic manner. And what you wanted in mind you made up in temper. You quarreled, you came to blows, with your fellow-dancers in any of a half-score of small selfish daily disputes. Cleverness among you consisted in gaining any possible advantage over the others and in calling each other names. Also in maneuvering bits of money--as much as might be--from unpleasing men who hung about the dingy play-house. On holidays you were invariably half-drunk.’\n\nSaid I: ‘And wherein was she not petty?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You believed in yourself. You had not a doubt you belonged in worldly high places but were kept down by the malice and depravity of human nature, people about you. And you lived up to your vulgar ideal of ambition. There was a simplicity, an enlightening pathos in you then which was lacking in the linen-draper’s lodger.’\n\nIn my flawed way I saw that, but objected to the bygone Liverpool lady from many an angle.\n\nSaid I: ‘Had I no life of a sweetness and gentleness and with it something that buoyed and bore you on?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘Never once. You were many centuries ago a Greek girl of the aristocratic class, bred in an intellectual life. You read the philosophers in the cool retreats of an olive grove. The mental knowledge you have now compared to your learning then is a tangle of ignorance. But the Greek girl had no heart, no human flame, no active blood of personality. Those wanting I starved. The Liverpool dancer in her warming virile vulgarness bore me vastly farther on my way. You were a Greek woman in a still earlier time--of a type which murders all simplicity. Your body and mind were haunted by perfervid imagination and both ached with the weight of it. You were made of twisted fires. I grew in that day: grew burdenedly: grew distortedly.’\n\nAlways those Greek visions are my ‘half-familiar ghosts.’--\n\nSaid I: ‘Was I sometime a married woman?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You were--in four separate ages. Which brought you and me singular solitude.’\n\nSaid I: ‘Was I always woman?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘You were once a young lad of fierce temper and were at twenty a madman. And died mad. No male body and brain could withstand and outface merely the emotional besiegings of you.’\n\nSaid I: ‘When I went mad, what of you?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘I fell asleep, and knew no rest, but dreamed.’\n\nSaid I: ‘Of what?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘Things I always dreamed in your mad lapses--poetry served very conscious and very hot: the material Color of the Sunshine: the musical Softness of the Dawns: the pulsing Thoughts in Girls’ Throats: the Scent of Water-Falls.’\n\nThe Soul has an airless voice which tells her meanings, beside her words and in their rhythm.\n\nSaid I: ‘What do you, and how do you, with me now?’\n\nSaid the Soul: ‘I grow tired with you. Exasperated. Desperate. As if I too wore flesh. You are a deathly prison, a torture chamber. I turn everywhere and nowhere at all. You tire me--you wear me. I wait. I stay. Yet I move.’\n\nShe looked lovely, my Soul--and quite in and of this bitter-ish lovely world in its bloody bitter wrappings of bone and flesh. Around her neck was the Necklace she wore in all the ages, showing greenish in a dusk of gentian blue.--\n\nAll of it slyly garbles and cross-purposes me a little bit more than usual.\n\nI wish I’d been born a Wild Boar."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "1 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Not quite voilà-tout", "text": "The clearest lights on persons are small salient personal facts and items about them and their ways of life.\n\nTo know that a woman is ‘sensitive’ is to have but a blurred conception of her as one easily impressed, easily hurt. But to know that she wears thick union-suitish under-clothes and uncompromising cotton stockings is to know much about her: by those tokens she is plain: she is stupid: she is smugly virtuous: she is poor: she is narrow-thoughted: she lacks imagination: she is prosaic: she has a defective sense of humor: she is catty: she is ‘kind’: she catches cold: she is a thoroughly good woman.\n\nTo know that a child is ‘bright’ is to have no definite knowledge of the child. But to know she flies into rages and bites whisk-brooms, laces and her fragile grandmother is to have a wide-beamed far-reaching spirit-light upon her.\n\nThat I am ‘thoughtful’ means little or anything or nothing: that I love the odor of ink, that I hate the stings of conscience, that I never lounge untidily about the house or in my room but am always ‘groomed,’--those tell me to myself.\n\nHere for my enlightening I write a garbled list of my items and facts:\n\n--I never see a soft new yeast-cake without wishing to squeeze it for the salubrious feeling of the tinfoil bursting facilely and the yeast oozing with its odd dry juiciness through my fingers.\n\n--And I never see a shiny waxy green rubber plant without wanting to bite the leaves precisely and daintily with my sharp teeth.\n\n--My luncheon each late midday is made of four radishes, three crackers and a thin glass of water: an anchoretic feast which I eat with relish. The rhyme I murmur with it is: ‘what do you think, she lives upon nothing but victuals and drink.’\n\n--Whenever I look out my window at five in the afternoon I see a neat nice-looking strange nigger-woman walking past. And the nigger-woman glances casually up at my window and sees me. We are unknown to one another and have belike as much and no more in common as if we grew on different planets. But the nigger-woman and I are someway dimly liking each other and dimly knowing it.\n\n--I scent my belongings faintly with Houbigant’s Quelques Violettes perfume.\n\n--I like to light a box of matches at a twilight window-sill singly and by twos and threes and little bunches, and hold them till they burn out, and watch the little flames, and drop the burnt ends out the window: a pastime inherited from my child-self.\n\n--Of living creatures that I know I most hate cockroaches.\n\n--Of inanimate things that I know I most hate a loose shutter rattling at night in the wind.\n\n--While I smoke after-dinner cigarettes down-stairs I put flat round black records on a tall red Edison phonograph and I curl up in a leather chair in the dark to listen to the music which is soft and deep: ‘Che Gelida Manina’ in a wistful tenor, and ‘Refrain Audacious Tar,’ and ‘Ah Quel Giorno,’ and ‘Scenes That are Brightest’ and others and others--tantalizing, tawdry, artistic, cheaply pleasant, luring, whatnot. And by turns it makes me lighthearted, lightheaded, emotional, romantic, restless, evilly coarse. It is piquant debauchery. Music sweetly poisons me.\n\n--My bureau-drawers I keep neatly in order--lingerie and other articles arranged convenient to my hand in white rows and fragrant tidy piles: with the exception of the upper left-hand drawer which is a bit of terrific snarled chaos. In it is an inky handkerchief of an old vintage: in it are several un-mated crumpled gloves: in it are some olive-pits: in it is an empty sticky liquid cold-cream bottle with tufts of eider-down power-puff stuck to it: in it is a tangle of smudged ribbons: in it are two pieces of pink rock-candy: in it is a spent yellow-silk garter: in it is a torn sponge: in it are blackened pieces of chamois-skin: in it is a broken scissors: in it are three twisted ragged black-net veils: in it is a brass curtain ring: in it is a broken scattered string of coral beads: in it is a lump of wax: in it is a piece of knotted twine: in it are little bunches of cotton-wool: in it is a spilled box of powder whitening everything: in it is a spilled box of matches: in it is a jet bracelet broken into small pieces: in it is a broken hand-mirror: in it are some crushed cigarettes: in it is a ruined blue plume: in it is a warped leather purse: in it is a damaged lump of red fingernail paste: in it is a stick of gum arabic: in it is a bisque kewpie defiled by wax, ink, paste, powder and rock-candy: in it are some partly melted vestas: in it are other bits of rubbish: all in wildest disorder. Why I do not empty the drawer and burn the rubbish I don’t at all know.\n\n--I sometimes take one or two of the neighborhood children to a picture-show.\n\n--Sometimes as I lean at my window I alternate looking at the distant deeply-blue mountains by looking at the near-by women who chance to pass on the stone pavement below--the smartly-clad and lighthearted-seeming ones. I look at their good shoulders in pastel-toned silk and at their trim silk ankles and proud flaring skirts and insolent beautiful hats--the buoyant worldly insouciance of their ensembles--as their owners walk along on happy errands. As I look I feel Me to be behind prison bars looking out in thin psychic jealousy: regret for a time when I also went thus buoyantly on happy worldly errands and an odd raging silent impatience for a time when I may again. But with it too the wavering acquiescence in this analytic-writing mood.--‘pussy-cat-mieow,’ I ruminate, ‘can’t have any milk until her best petticoat’s mended with silk.’\n\n--One kind of man I impatiently scorn is the kind that looks bored if I mention Ibsen or ceramics or Aztec civilization but is interested instantly, alertly if I mention my garters. Equally I abhor the type that begrudges me my own private phases of amorousness: not those who condemn me for them: not those who dislike them in me: not those who deplore them: but who begrudge me them.\n\n--Always I come up a stairway softly. Always I close doors softly. I make no noise.\n\n--The quaintest character I have met with in fiction is Huckleberry Finn’s father, looked at as a father. Next in quaintness I place Sally Brass, regarded as a human being.\n\n--I like a glass of very hot water and a dish of preserved damson plums on a sultry August day: and another of each on top of that: and another of each on top of that.\n\n--I like the word addle: I hate the word redress. I would fain have my ‘wrongs’ ever addled than redressed: merely for the word prejudice.\n\n--I would rather that almost any physical disaster should befall me than that I ever achieve an ‘abdomen.’ When an abdomen comes in at the door life’s romances fly fast out the windows: so it looks to me. May death overtake me haply before the menopause.\n\n--The pictures I have crowded on a small side-wall space two feet from my eyes as I sit at my desk are: Theda Bara as Carmen: the late Queen Isabella of Spain: Marie Lloyd, loved of the London populace: a velvety-looking black-and-orange print of a leopard: Blanche Sweet, loveliest of film actors: John Keats, a small old print: Ethel Barrymore, a pencil drawing made by herself: Nell Gwyn, a photograph of a Lely portrait: Watts’s ‘Hope’: Stanley Ketchel, dead middle-weight fighter: ‘Jane Eyre’ by a Polish artist: Fanny Brawn, the solitary extant silhouette print: Ty Cobb: two children: Charlotte Corday in the Prison de l’Abbaye: Susan B. Anthony: a Chinese lady: Andrea del Sarto: Queen Boadicea: and Christy Mathewson.\n\n--I am old-fashioned in many of my tastes--in all my reading and writing tastes. I do not like typewriters: they make fingertips callous in a poor cause. And I do not like fountain-pens which someway seem suitable only for business-letters, forgeries, bookkeeping and crude cursory love-letters. I like a steel pen in a fat glossy green enameled wood penholder with a thick pleasant-feeling rubber sheath at the lower end.\n\n--I wear to-day a modest frock of black silk: beneath it a light silk petticoat: beneath that a white pussy-willow silk ‘envelope’ and a pale narrow pink silk shirt chastened by many launderings: no stays: thick white silk stockings gartered above my knees by circles of mild mauve elastic: on my feet cross-ribboned bright-buckled black shoes: round my neck a jet necklace:--all of it a costume that might be of a conventional woman, a plain-living woman, a good woman, a well-bred woman--saving only that beneath my left shoulder-blade the smooth new pussy-willow silk has a jagged two-inch rent where it caught on a drawer-handle: and the rent--in lieu of neatly mending it with the thread and needle of woman’s custom--I caught up any way by its jagged edges and tied tight in a hard vicious heathen knot: the note of spiritual fornication, of Mary-Mac-Laneness: always there’s some involuntary pagan touch to undo me, to arraign me, to betray me to God and to myself.\n\n--I wear five-and-a-half A-last shoes: number twenty-one snug whalebone stays: and weigh a hundred-twenty-four pounds.\n\n--I am fond of green peas, baseball and diamond rings.\n\n--I like violently to spoil a little charlotte-russe with a fork: it gives me the same feeling of lawless sweet-fiery lust which must belong to a Moslem soldier when deflowering a Christian virgin: and harms nobody.\n\n--Sometimes when I’m dressing in the morning I glance down through my window and see two elderly Butte business men, one a lawyer and one a banker, going by on the way to their offices. And I wonder at how frightfully respectable they look in their tailored clothes and reproachless gloves and perfectly celestial-looking hats. I murmur: ‘Robin and Richard were two pretty men who lay in bed till the clock struck ten.’\n\n--I keep on my desk a little doll with fluffy skirts, blue eyes, pouting lips and curly hair and named Little Jane Lee after an adorable child I have seen in moving pictures.\n\n--I am five feet six inches tall in my highish heels:\n\n--I wear number six gloves: the calf of my leg is a shapely thing.\n\n--The six extant Americans I most admire are Thomas A. Edison, Harriet Monroe, Gertrude Atherton, Theodore Roosevelt, the remaining Wright Brother, and Amy Lowell.\n\n--I think I’d learn to be a cook, a professional cook, if I were less easily fatigued.\n\n--I love the sound of the clinking of two clean new white clay pipes, one upon the other.\n\n--I crack nuts with my teeth.\n\nVoilà!\n\nBut not quite voilà-tout."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "6 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A damned spider", "text": "To-day was one of the To-morrows of encompassing dissatisfaction when this seems all a nasty world and a nasty life.\n\nA Spider drowned in my bath-tub this morning.\n\nIt was one of those long-legged spiders. It was in the tub when I went there--a small ovalish dark-gray pellet with seven ray-like legs as of an evil little sun lying flat on a white desert. It feels inconceivable that any creature should naturally have an odd number of legs: we are all, including spiders, laid out as with rule and compass. Perhaps it is inconceivable. But this Spider had seven legs. I counted them while I knelt, blue-peignoired, beside the tub with my elbows on the edge and watched the Spider and waited for it to go away. Whether it had lost a leg, or had one too many, or its kind is normally made like that: those things I vexedly wondered about. In either case it seemed a so much worse Spider. It did not go away so I touched it gently with an oblong of green soap. Then it moved and began to walk up the side of the tub. But the side is smooth as glass and always it slipped back. I went to my room and fetched a post-card. With a post-card newly from Delaware I lifted the Spider out of the bath-tub. Then I scaled card and Spider to the farthest ceiling corner of the room. Then I drew the tub one-third full of tepid water. And there floating in it as if brought down by Black Art was the seven-legged Spider, drowned and ruined. It spoiled the atmosphere and anticipation of my morning tub. I shuddered miserably. I pulled out the rubber plug and water and Spider washed down and away into the dark sewer-wastes of Butte, into the bowels of the earth, through the gateways of hell, I hope. I took a hasty shower with a flavor of long-legged Spiders in it. I dressed, and combed and coifed my hair, with the clouded thought in me that throughout my life I shall inevitably encounter by eternal law a long-legged Spider from time to time. I know there’ll be no evading it. Those who know statistics doubtless could tell me how many Spiders I shall encounter in so many or so many years: the exact percentage even to the division of a week and the half or the quarter of a Spider. There is something disconcerting and tragic in the thought.\n\nThe drowned Spider’s ghost pursued me all day though its memory faded.\n\nMy breakfast, though it included an egg, seemed antagonistic, hostile toward me as I ate it. It made me melancholy.\n\nI watched from my back window a slim boy painting a porch and singing in incipient tenor a rhythmic lullaby beginning ‘go to sleep my dus-ky ba-by.’ He painted silently for some minutes and then dipped his brush in the tin of paint. Whenever he left off painting to dip the brush he sang. Once he failed to sing when he dipped the brush but instead burst forth with it in the midst of painting a long mustard streak on his porch. Ordinarily that would not have mattered to me since I am innately keyed and pitched to expect the galvanically unexpected. But to-day it made me rackingly nervous.\n\nIn the afternoon I went for a walk. Down and down, seventeen squares from here, in a quiet neighborhood a strange woman accosted me. She was pale and smartly dressed and quite drunk. She said, ‘Listen--can you remember which of these corners I was to meet a friend at?’ It made me feel annoyed and bewildered and sad and silly.\n\nWhen I came back I read awhile--a story of Guy de Maupassant’s about a little dog named Pierrot, whose owner loved him much but loved money more and could not bring herself to pay a tax of eight francs to make Pierrot’s existence legal. So she threw him into a pit. As heartbreaking a tale as even de Maupassant ever wrote. It made all the loves in this world feel terrifyingly sordid. It made me unhappy.\n\nThen I found a poetry-book and read about the Blessed Damozel leaning out from the gold bar of heaven. Always, by her loveliness alone, she stirs me to my still depths of tears. But to-day the song made me feel over-wrought and life-worn.\n\nTo-night I walked out to a little desert-space west of the town, a very pale, very gray desert, with a sweet wet mist like dissolving pearls swathing it. The million placid stars looked down, remote and hard, as if each one had newly forsaken me. It made me afraid and cold around my heart.\n\nHere I sit and nothing in all the world is pleasant or reassuring.\n\nThat damned Spider."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "8 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "To wander and hang and float about", "text": "My damnedest damningest quality is Wavering--Wavering--\n\nI might say I prefer the dawn to the twilight or the twilight to the dawn.\n\nNeither would be true.\n\nI love the dawn--I love the twilight.\n\nWhat I unconsciously prefer is the long negative Wavering space-of-day between the two.\n\nI might say I prefer heaven to hell or hell to heaven.\n\nNeither would be true.\n\nMy garbled gyral nature, partaking uneasily of both, prefers to wander and hang and float about between the two.\n\nI might say I prefer strength to weakness or weakness to strength.\n\nNeither would be true.\n\nWhat I prefer is a hellish hovering, an endless torturing Tenterhook between the two.\n\nAnd that Wavering preference is against my will, against my reason, against my judgment, against my taste and liking--against my life, my welfare, my salvation: against the clear lights of my spirit.\n\nI know I work intently and industriously at the articles of my damnation in the Wavering--Wavering--\n\nI know it would be better to die at once: failing that, to live but to live positively as a beggar, a whore, a thief or a milliner. Knowing that, I know also I Waver: I know I shall prefer to Waver: I know I shall constantly Waver.\n\nI am constant--I am remarkably profoundly constant--in my Wavering.\n\nIn the morning as I dress I draw on a stocking--a long black or white glistening stocking. I know I do it only because the mixed big world, which refuses to Waver, is pushing--pushing me. I would choose if I could--though loathing my choice--to stay with my bare foot and my stocking in my hand, Wavering. Between drawing it on and pausing barefoot, Wavering. I prefer not to draw on the stocking: I prefer not to be barefoot: I prefer Wavering--Wavering--\n\nWhen I’m hungry I choose: not to let food alone: not to eat it: to have it by me and Waver, Waver emptily. Not to enjoy its anticipation: not to contemplate it. No--no! To Waver! I reach and take the food because the world in its pushing pushes me.\n\nIf the world stopped pushing--\n\nOne reason it will be pleasant to be dead: I can then no longer Waver.\n\nWorms will eat me unwaveringly. Or they may then do the Wavering. But I shall no more pause with a bare foot and an empty stocking, a dish of food and a gnawing midriff.\n\nHere I sit as yet, alive and Wavering.\n\nThe Wavering is not the pale cast of thought: it is not my way of analysis: it is only Wavering--Wavering--\n\nWavering is not among the blue-green Stones in my antique necklace: not by that name--not as one Stone.\n\nIt is a marked and hateful and hellish gift of this present Me who house my Soul.\n\nIt is half of this Mary MacLane--who is I--: and I know.\n\nI am constant alone--noticeably tensely constant--in my Wavering: and less constant in Wavering than in the ghoulish preference.\n\nAn odd and subtle doom."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "3 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A thousand kisses", "text": "Among my other gifts I own also Wantonness. In proof of which I am wishing as I sit here for a Thousand careless kisses: eleven o’clock of still evening--a Thousand Kisses.\n\nA wonderful, wonderful attribute, Wantonness: rich, rich luster in the conscious temperament which owns it, a Gift-thing delicate and gorgeous.\n\nBy it I want a Thousand Kisses: a Thousand--made all of Wantonness.\n\nKisses come in differing kinds and only one is Wanton.\n\nThe kiss of a lover has an intense cosmic use: the kiss of a mother is tender fostering food: the kiss of a friend is vantage and grace of friendliness: the kiss of a child is cool charm of snowflakes and green springtime leaves.\n\nAnd the kiss of Wantonness is not of use, nor of food, nor of gracing vantage, nor of childhood charm--but is restless essence of humanness and worldliness and mere sheer limitless encompassing liking: born of sweet lips, alien it might be, and secretly ‘unattuned,’ but warm and fond and present: answering the pathos of infinite jejuneness which flows, flows always in red human blood.\n\nThrough the race rides a long dread wistfulness, made of tears and lies and the barbaric distress and pitfall of everyday’s journey: a crying wish for a cup of warmed drugged sweet ease to turn it all a moment away: but a moment away.\n\nAnd through all the race is the measureless poetry, purling and mantling in its bowl of flesh. Each human one is made of the sun, and made of the moon, and made of the four winds and the seas and the last pink sea-foam on the crests of the twilit waves: and made of salt and of sugar and of lonesome calling of loons and quick song of skylarks: and made of sword-edges and of money and of dolls and toys and painted glass: and made of loose reckless shuffling of dry autumn leaves, and of nerves and of illusions and of broken food and hesitance: and made of Mother-Goose rhymes and of cigarette-ashes and of raveled silk: and made of layers and layers of mixed-up passionate colors and of gilded cakes and of strawberries and of temperamental orgasms and raw silvery onions and gaming and dancing and minute-by-minute inconsistency: all veiled in a thin gold veil--all in a thin gold veil.\n\nBetwixt the wistfulness and the poetry--hélas, what chance has the human equation, unsought, unwarned, unchallenged of God to be straitly equable!\n\nNo chance.\n\nHappily no chance.\n\nThus I, Mary MacLane, so conscious of Me and garbledly gifted, want a Thousand Kisses at eleven o’clock of a still evening.\n\nNo spirit-hands of Love are laid soft on my drooping shoulders in the passing days: no Love--no Love--in all my life.\n\nNo miracle Wonder and Gentleness stirs in and against my Heart: my Heart is strangely dead of a strange Realness, known and felt but unachieved:--no Love--no Love in my life.\n\nAnd I can wish for no Love, for the listless Heart is listlessly dead.\n\nI wish instead, in hastening present clock-ticking moments, for a Thousand present-warmed Kisses: a Thousand in Wanton response to a Wanton ’leven-o’clock.\n\nDominating waving washing warmth of Wantonness, compassing me at eleven o’clock.\n\nA Thousand careless insouciant Kisses: a Thousand gorgeous delicate Kisses: a round Thousand.\n\nFrom what lips--whose lips--what do I know?--: so their Kisses are a Thousand.\n\nFrom what lips--what do I care?--: so they be eager and live and tenderly false.\n\n--come some of the Thousand glowing on my pink lips, and my white fingers, which were tense, relax--\n\n--come more of the Thousand, and my rigid hard-riding thoughts grow drowsy and pliant and negligible.\n\n--come more of the Thousand, and my knees and the marrow in my bones are gently aware of most logical opiate ease--\n\n--come more of the Thousand, and my midriff is full of cream-and-chocolate casualness and my smooth arms are washed down with mists of custom.\n\n--come more of the Thousand, and my seven senses start to melt at the edges--\n\n--come more of the Thousand, and the palms of my hands wax merely pleasant-feeling and the soles of my feet fatly comfortable--\n\n--come the last of the Thousand in a swirling silly lovely lightly-insane shower--and I feel exactly like a woman in the next street who goes forth clad in mustard-and-cerise with a devilish black-and-white Valeska-Suratt parasol: and more--much more--I feel the way she looks--\n\nFor this Wanton-thing is not amour but psychology: in it I am less the mænad than the philosopher: less the Cyprian woman than the Muse.\n\nI am a deeply gifted woman.\n\nI am not prone on my green couch, frayed, frazzled, bowed-down in spirit from a day of frightful stress and cross-purpose.\n\nInstead, hair-triggerishly alive, with definite desire beating hotly this moment in my throat: the wish for Kisses--Kisses far removed from Death and Graves and Coffins: Kisses of this present clock-tickingness, Kisses useless, meaningless, sweet--oh, sweet!--\n\n--in number, a Thousand: in kind. Wanton."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "14 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A fluttering-moth wish", "text": "A wish that God would come personally to see me flutters in my thoughts ever and anon like a restless moth.\n\nI am in a prison-mood and coldly content to be in it. For how long content--content is not the word: despairingly acquiescent--there’s no word to express that--I can noway tell. But now I live and breathe aloof and strange-mooded. And with it I wish God would visit me a moment.\n\nIt is not a strong wish. Yet restless and persistent.\n\nI want to be free from myself and away, loosed in the little broad big narrow World: but first and more I want God to visit me.\n\nI want people again, those away from here who are my friends--some glowing-spirited ones who appreciate my Mind and cater to me: I want, I think, a poet to love me with some unobvious madness: but first and more I want God to visit me.\n\nMore than I want strength of spirit and flesh, more than I want a fat mental peace, more than I want to know John Keats in star-spaces: more than I want my dream-Child: I want God to visit me.\n\nMore than I wish this appalling tiredness would leave me: more than I wish this I write to be a realization, a de-fait portrait of the thin-hidden Me, my self-expression achieved: more than I want to be quit of my two black dresses and back in the wide sweet frivol of variegated clothes: I want God to visit me.\n\nGod must know all about that. He must have known it a long time. He still does not come. If he would come and tell me one thing, one certain thing, it would be enough. It would show me a direction and I could keep on in it by myself. If God would tell me even a sheerest matter-of-fact, for sure--like What O’Clock by his time it really is: that would be a spark from which I could build an eternal fire for myself. Forever after I could dispense with God as a personality.\n\nI am strangely weak. Strong of will, strong of mind, but weak of purpose: damnably, damnedly. I shall never be able to write in words one one-thousandth of the dramatic drastic weakness which is in me. But I hate weakness with so deep and strong a hatred, and to know one eternal certain thing would be so roundly restful, I could then go on: I could vanquish the potent pettinesses which beset me.\n\nI do not want from God a passport, a safe-conduct into heaven. I don’t want to get into heaven. I don’t know what it is, but the word has sounds of finality, as if all winds, sweet nervous petal-laden winds, had stopped blowing forever. For cycles and centuries to come the Soul of me will be too restless to live where winds can not blow.\n\nI love the journey: so that only I might have one dim torch to go by. I love the pitfalls and ditches--all the dangers--black-shaded woods and wolds, and lonesome plains and briery paths, and very wet swamps, and strong whistling gales which chill me: so that I could feel but one tiny bright-bladed truth, within and without, pricking and urging me to struggle on through it all till I might emerge at last like a human being, rather than linger indifferent and inanimate like a jaded wood-nymph in drearily pleasant spaces."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "27 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Twenty inches of ajarness", "text": "God might come to visit me on a Monday afternoon.\n\nHe would come in at the door of my blue-white room which had been left about twenty inches ajar: for I cannot imagine God, the aloof and reticent, opening a shut door to visit anyone. It is as if God purposely lacks all initiative. If I wish to meet God I must first suffer deeps of terror and passion and loneliness to make the mood that wants it. Then I must train my life down to two plain frocks. And to crown all my room-door must be left ajar on the day he happens to come or he will not come in. That seems certain: but for twenty inches of ajarness at my door he will not come in.\n\nIn it God is quite fair. I do the reaching-out and I live out the despairs: he furnishes a fact to go upon: I go upon it, in some anguish doubtless: but then mine, not God’s, are the lights and the translated splendor. It is a ‘gentleman’s game’ God plays. It is because I feel that to be true, more than for that he is the Dealer, that I would have a word with him.\n\nOn a Monday afternoon--\n\nHe might come in the figure of a precise mystic-looking little old man, punctilious of dress and manner like an English duke on the stage. He might wear overwhelmingly correct afternoon attire, with spats and a monocle on a wide ribbon. It someway fills my peculiar trivial concepts of God: mystic-seeming because he is the God of the dead dusty hosts of Israel, and punctiliously modern because he is also the God of new-poeted radium-gifted Now. A God like a druid or like Aladdin’s genie, such as I fancied as a child, or like Jove or Vulcan, would seem an inadequate and unsuitable God. What would such a one know of the shape and fashion of my two plain dresses, and of my shoes, and my breakfasts, and the charmed surface joy in the back of a magazine? God, to be God to me, must know all those things.\n\nAnd if he only bespoke me in thunderous preludes touching souls’ triumphant apotheoses--bold and intolerable ecstasies beyond heaven’s last poignantest door--it would be nothing to my purpose. Those my poet-brain can make for me if I wish. But I’d like God to explain me the little frightful puzzles which thrive all around me in the wide daylight of this knife-and-fork-ness.\n\nGod might come walking lightly in and perhaps seat himself fastidiously in my chastest chair. He might cross one knee over the other. He might adjust his monocle and regard me through it speculatively or sadly or politely-wearily. I should be outwardly calm but I might feel an inward panic: lest he go away again without having told me a fact.\n\nI might say to God: ‘God, if you please, this small blue vase on my window-sill--I see it and I touch it and I love it--will you tell me, you who know, is there a blue vase there or is there no vase?’\n\nAnd God might merely glance at the vase through his glass and daintily hold his white handkerchief crumpled-up in his gray-gloved fingers and might merely say: ‘Madame, you have eyes with which to see the vase and hands with which to touch it and sentiments to lend it charm for you, no doubt. Then why not let them inform you as to its actuality?’\n\nAnd then I might say, with a weariness equal to God’s: ‘My senses are pleasant--they are sweet--but they do not inform me, or they inform me wrong. Because they don’t plainly tell me whether it’s a Blue Vase or a Blue Shadow--just for that I burn in little disconcerting hell-fires, and vulture-thoughts with beaks and talons come and tear me in the night, and I starve and decay trivially, and my life is a flattish ruin and a tasteless darkness and a slight shallow death, a death in the sunshine--I am fed-up with a sense of death because of pricking doubts as to my blue vase’s realness.’\n\nTo which, again, God might reply with his head tilted to one side, tranquil and impersonal: ‘As to that, Madame, there may be less death in doubt than in certainty about your vase. You might in discovering it discover in yourself no right whatever to the sunshine--no right to live in it, no right to die in it.’\n\nAnd I might answer, with some insolent feeling: ‘I should wish to discover the fact about it though it proved to me I don’t exist and never existed--that I’m a dust on a moth’s wing, and at that alien--not belonging there.’\n\nUpon which God, for what I know, might only shrug-the-shoulders.\n\nIn that identity he might shrug-the-shoulders or break-the-world with equal omnipotent plausibleness.\n\nBut I might try again. I might say: ‘One thing feels realer than my blue vase--this blue-and-green Necklace which my Soul wears. It is rare and recherché but my beautiful Soul is very tired from wearing it. Will you please unclasp it for me?’\n\nAnd God might say, deprecatory: ‘Pray, Madame, do you consider what portion of the beauty you mention may be in the Necklace? Should I unclasp it--it is doubtful whether you would recognize your soul without it.’\n\nTo which I might answer, with more insolent feeling: ‘I don’t know anything of that and I don’t care for it. I only know I want the Necklace off. To wear it makes me languid and frenzied and worn--full of wild goaded saneness and the wish to go violently mad.’\n\nAnd God might answer: ‘Permit me to express my regrets for those sentiments which, I should add, I neither concur in nor refute nor deny nor share.’\n\nThere I might be: conversationally whip-sawed.--God is full of works of beauty, serene and miraculous: Gray Lakes and Blue Mourning Mountains and Deserts beneath the Moon. Those have quietly ravished me many and many a night and day--and will again, and still again, in pacing To-morrows.\n\nBut I can’t tell What O’Clock it is by them. And if God were by me and I asked him the time the odds are all that he would look at the toy-face of my little ivory toy-clock, which sets on my desk where I can see it myself, and tell me the time by that.\n\nBut though he is thus perplexing he knows the right time and could tell me it.\n\nFor that restlessly I wish God would make me one brief visit.\n\nI wish that though he should so godlily baffle me and divinely bore me."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "13 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A profoundly delicious idea", "text": "It is nineteen minutes after one on a summer night. And if only I felt a bit hungry this is what I should wish--spread out on a damask cloth before me in a few gold-medallioned Chinese dishes, with no forks or knives: first of all, two thin foie-gras sandwiches, four grilled snails and maybe a little alligator pear: on top of those, two truffles: on top of those, two slim onions: on top of those, two thin salted biscuits: on top of those, a bit of Camembert cheese: on top of that, two cigarettes: on top of all a hollow-stemmed glass of sparkling Burgundy.\n\nI’m not hungry, but it is comforting to think how delightful that supper would taste if I were. Food is a so magic rich gusty gift bestowed on the human race: and is besides a profoundly delicious Idea.\n\nI like food better to imagine than even to eat. If I were hungry I think I could obtain that chaste supper item for item, and eat it: swallow it down magic and all, and thus vanquish it magic and all, and there an end. So I am glad I am not hungry. It is much more delectable to sit here and think that if I were--\n\nif I were--\n\na Hollow-stemmed Glass of Sparkling Burgundy.\n\ntwo cigarettes.\n\na Bit of Camembert Cheese.\n\ntwo Thin Salted Biscuits.\n\ntwo Slim Onions.\n\ntwo Truffles.\n\ntwo Thin Foie-Gras Sandwiches: Four Grilled Snails: and maybe a Little Alligator Pear.\n\nIf I were a bit hungry: oh, the idea of a little supper! It would then be blestness, benediction--fruit of the very garden of Paradise!"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "28 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A mountebank’s cloak", "text": "I am so Clever. I am the Cleverest human being I know.\n\nI have thought my Cleverness an outer quality, a mountebank’s cloak, and as such not belonging in this book of my own self. But there are no outer qualities. Everything in and about me is my own self.\n\nMy Cleverness is of high quality--even supernatural, I have thought--and is of unobvious tenors.\n\nTo any essentially false nature, such as mine, a quick and positive Cleverness is its needfulest resource in coping with this pushing world. To any un-sanely sensitive nature such as mine Cleverness is its fender against human encounters and onslaughts.\n\nThere is no Cleverness in this I write. There is writing skill and my dead-feeling genius. But my Cleverness is beside those points.\n\nI use Cleverness when I encounter people.\n\nSometimes I like people and wish to impress them.\n\nAlways I am vain and sometimes I wish my vanity catered to.\n\nAnd I can get from people whatever tribute I choose.\n\nI mostly choose to bewilder and half-fascinate which is easiest: I talk about anything, nothing, everything with a tinsel-bright complexity which captures average intellects. And even very Clever people seem not Clever to me because I feel so exceeding Clever to myself. I am a little more intuitive, a little falser, a little lightning-quicker than the most artistically antic mentalities I have known.\n\nI am a lady with the ladies, a woman with women, a highly intelligent writer with writers, a loosed fish with the loose fish: being all the time nothing but my own self, unspeakably incongruent. Having never found anyone remotely matching me in barbaric and devastating incongruity of nature I use in human encounters whatever phase makes the occasion most gently befit me. I cater, or I thrill some bastard dull brain, or I grow roundly versatile: all with a sudden coruscant Cleverness which is not in itself any of Me but is my mountebank’s scarlet cloak.\n\nBut its main cause and reason is not vanity nor a fancy for piquant trickery, nor the wish to try my superior wings in glowing human atmospheres--the preponderant impulse to fly because I can fly. It’s none of those, but a need of protection, of a bright armor to keep other people’s superficialities from touching me. There’s a human effluvium which I feel from people which would touch, wrap, enclose me in a harsh vapor--a half-froze, half-stinging worldly cloud. It hurts with thin cruelness like a corroding spray of acid on my skin: unless I send out the sudden air of my own Cleverness to keep it off and away.\n\nIt is long months since I have encountered people with any impulse save hastily to avoid them. But if I should meet, with an aggression of mettle and mood, some woman or man or little group of human sorts (except children of and for whom I have always a fear and a respect) I should then suddenly be casual and half-fascinating and phosphorescently glowing and insolent: being inside me haggard from solitude, wistful from a bereftness and a beauty-sense, suffering and lost.\n\nAh, I’m notably Clever!\n\nI write a letter of Clever delicate surprisingness--it is the only Clever writing I do. There are twenty people, now long outside my life, to whom a Mary-Mac-Lane letter is the agreeably-vividest thing that could come into a day. The letter, which is an unapparent cater, is not real Me who am someway a strong and contemptuous spirit--but instead one tinsel facet. And it makes people--people! people!--admire and defer to me in a subtlest human aspect: an unwilling antagonistic homage. It stays me, buoys me for the time.\n\nI am profoundly Clever in that I who am in reality so futile, so wavering, so sensitively lyingly artistic, can still show myself aggressively Clever to other persons. I must, being false, be Clever in order to get by.\n\nIt is at its best a trickster’s quality: and so much the more am I Clever in stretching it out over my shaded life like a strong bright cloak-of-mail.\n\nJust to be Mary MacLane--who am first of all my own self!--and get by with it!--how I do that I can not quite make out.\n\nI’m by odds the Cleverest human being I know: more than likely one of the Cleverest who ever lived in this world."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "9 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A familiar sharp twist", "text": "I have--a Broken Heart--\n\nIt is nearly a year now.\n\nIt feels strange to be writing it. What is one’s Heart? But it is a plain fact of me.\n\nI have not had a Broken Heart in the years before. I have had silly fancies--I have wasted the outer tissues of my Heart, and it has been bruised and battered. But nothing pierced deep enough to break it till this.\n\nMy Broken Heart is the outstanding inner item of my life: and it still is a very small thing even in my own reckoning. It tortures me minutely all the minutes and moments and hours. And yet my all-round life moves on beside it and often passes it on the road.\n\nMy Broken Heart contributes nothing, no cause and no urge, to the writing of this song of my Soul and bones. It rather is a handicap. It makes me sit and brood. It makes my eyelids heavy and my head droop. It makes my shoulders ache. It makes me sit longish half-hours with my head on my lonely hands. It fills me with foolish wasting despair.\n\nIts foolishness is the foremost thing about my Broken Heart. It is not a foolishness of worldly reasons nor of outer causes but of all the surprising folly of myself crowded into my Heart and into that which Broke it. The foolishness would not be so noticeable if the Brokenness were not so hideous and genuine and actual and matter-of-course. It was foolish to lay myself open, who am humanly starved, to the possible Breaking of my Heart: and doubly foolish to let it be Broken. And being left in possession of a Broken Heart I feel it to be a triply insanely foolish thing: but complete and absolute and natural.\n\nI am so oddly a fool.\n\nThe proper price for such or such a thing in the Market might be one-and-twenty drops of red human blood. But I headlongly pay for it one-and-ninety drops: each one touched with fire, shot with purple, tinctured with hottest spirit-essence. The proper payment for Love is to pay back value received--which is enough. But I in addition dip my white bare foot into red world-and-hell flames by way of quixotic bonus. When other persons emerge from Love with the old-fashioned accustomed wounds and scars I emerge with besides an immensely useless futilely ruined foot.\n\nIt is wildest foolishness. Not merely folly. Folly is something picturesque--a bit romantic.\n\nI am oddly a fool. It is that consciousness that rushes over me with each sad black thought of my Broken Heart.\n\nMy Broken Heart--it feels half-false to myself as I write it. And the written words look half-false to my eyes. But it is realer than my fingernails: than my palms: than my aching left foot.\n\nMy Broken Heart, besides being a triviality is a mistake, and will pass in time doubtless, but is long about it.\n\nIt is one thing I do not dwell upon in this book of me. A Broken Heart is sharply immediate like a newly-bitten tongue. It may bleed at a touch. To dwell on it connects me strainedly with the world around, and the world is really gone from me. This book is I as I breathe alone. I cannot write in it the silly shadowy Breaking of my Broken Heart. This writing is I Just Beneath My Skin. My Broken Heart is beneath bones and flesh. And though my M.-MacLane heart intact is wildly individual, my Broken Heart is merely human: made not alone by me and not alone by God. Its place in this I write is just outside the margins.\n\nAt times my Broken Heart feels far off while I’m feeling it hideous and wan inside my breast. Myself is Me, and much of Me had nothing to do with my Heart when it Broke: though I loved with all of Me. I loved with all of Me one who lives in New York--and I lost and lost, all the way. There was mere human ordinariness about which I built up a strangely sincere temple-of-grace which I looked to see shed light on my life like the new eternal beauty of a Day-break. I gave the best I knew to it, from the distance, and I lost. The day was a little day and broke at last only like my Heart. All was broken without so much as clasp-of-hands.\n\nI am realest, strongest, passionately-sincerest in my essential known falseness--\n\nIt was all foolish and petty and someway false but I felt foolishly and shudderingly that I could live no more. But I am singularly brave from life-long custom. I have no pleas and surrenderings in me. I shudder but live on.\n\nOne Thursday I felt suddenly oppressed and beset and something in my throat cried out to the absent God to help me and guard me.\n\nIt was something in my throat which shrieked it dumbly in the deafening silence in my room. It was not I myself: for I am unsuppliant toward everyone human and divine though there often come such Thursdays.\n\nHarder than Thursdays are Fridays and some other days when comes a familiar sharp twist beneath my chest-bones without the cognizance of my remembering thoughts: and when though I strive against it my Broken Heart makes me sit longish half-hours with my head on my hands."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "7 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A dark bright fierce fire", "text": "I am Lonely. I am so Lonely that I can feel myself rattle inside my life like one live seed in a hollow gourd.\n\nI am on fire with Loneliness.\n\nI am living this month alone in this house. The solitude is pregnant: Doors and Door-knobs and Curtains and Tables have silently come alive in it and have taken on identities like those of tamed wild beasts.\n\nI do housework--I dust window-sills and water flowers. I gather up newspapers and brush the floors with a dust-mop. I wash my dishes. I cook my breakfasts. I look out of windows. I linger at screen-doors.\n\nI answer the telephone: I say, ‘They’re not at home.’\n\nI change my frock and put on a hat and a cloak and gloves and go softly out the door and front gate on an errand.\n\nI meet people on the street whom I know, whom I may speak to, whom I may avoid: who may speak to me: who may avoid me: for I am at best well hated in this Butte.\n\nI come back again, softly unlock the door and come in. I come upstairs, take off the out-door things, give a hasty side-glance in my glass and go downstairs.\n\nI read awhile. To-day I read an old-fashioned short story whose soft wondrous prose cadences fed my senses--the Parable of the Prodigal Son.--for this my son was dead and is alive--was lost and is found--.\n\nBut I am very restless and cannot read long.\n\nI am on fire--dark bright fierce fire with Loneliness.\n\nI move about again from room to room. I look out of windows and linger at doors.\n\nI close my eyes and open my eyes.\n\nMy Soul-and-bones! I’m afire with Loneliness!\n\nIt is Loneliness not made of the Empty House and the tamed wild Door-knobs and Doors and Curtains and the Lonely Errands. Those are its small-fruits. Itself is my ancient daylight Loneliness dating from Three-Years-Old when I first began whisperingly analyzing things and finding little life-items to be of a fierce bitter importance.\n\nIf I were living among people, friendly people, then the Loneliness though unchanged would be disguised and vested with a padded muffling power--false, belike, and a mistake (but everything is false and a mistake: only there are wrong mistakes and right mistakes)--but made of the world-stuff that lets a human being get by in this nervous life.\n\nBut it would be of no use now. I must face Loneliness: and outface it. I do, and with no effort: for I am Lonelier than Loneliness’s self. So it feels. This locked-in mood--soon it may be worn down and outgrown, and the husks blown away in the winds.\n\nBut may come after it a wilder Loneliness of being free, fearfully free: flavored with the heaviness of rain at night and draggledness of beggar-women’s skirts.--\n\nMeanwhile bright and black among Doors and Door-knobs and Curtains and Tables burns the fire of this Loneliness with strong, strong flame. It is mystic agony. There is no thinking in it. There is an utterly irrational wish, an aching yearning for people: not people to see, or listen to, or talk to, but--humanness I could feel with familiarity. I wish for hands and bodies near me: breath for mine faintly to mingle with: the feel of their human garments in the room around me: the feel of the pulsing blood in their veins remotely vibrant in the air: the feel of minds and spirits and throats and rich warm virile hair of human heads keeping me warmly company. I have heard one may step rarefied out of this living-place into the Fourth Dimension, where one feels everything without the efforts of feeling, and knows everything without the weights of knowing. It might be that I grope for in this black bright anguish.\n\nYet I feel rarely rarefied, heavily rarefied, wornly rarefied in this living-place where Loneliness burns me in strong fire and where I can shake my life like a hollow gourd and hear the eerie rattling sound I make in it."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "17 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Late afternoon", "text": "Last night as I slept I dreamed a vivid dream.\n\nI dreamed it was late afternoon and I was locked in a condemned cell, sentenced to die. I would be led out and hanged on a gallows the following morning at day-break. I dreamed I sat beneath a narrow window in the cell through which shone the light of the waning afternoon. The light was very pale, as of sunshine long dead. I dreamed I held on my knees a small block of paper which had a half-inch blue border at the top to mark a perforation, and in my hand I had a red pencil. And I dreamed I had cheated the gallows and was writing a little ballad about it in sudden rhymes and rhythms quite alien to my waking forms. When I awoke the song was still beating time in my brain. And with my black awake-time pencil I wrote, except for two words, the rhyme, title and all, as I dreamed:\n\nLATE AFTERNOON.\n\nThey’ll think when I pass through that door To-morrow in the dawn, I’ll then be going to my death. It’s I’ve already gone.\n\nThey’ll watch me walk serenely out, Still-nerved and somber-eyed, ‘So strong,’ they’ll say, ‘to meet her death.’ To-day it is I died.\n\nThere’ll be my pulses quick with life, My white sweet throat, my breath: But flesh and bone are all will hang. This noon I met my death.\n\nFor days I charmedly dwelt on death-- I raved at death--I swore-- Till vexédly death waived the date: And came this Day-Before.\n\nFrom being lured with artful thoughts My life abortive grew. From being broached in livid mood My death aborted too.\n\nTo-morrow they’ll remark my calm-- No fuss, no fright, no swoon. They’ll kill a wench to-morrow dawn Was dead to-day at noon.\n\nThree oddnesses are in that dream:\n\nthat it is true to life in that I in my lightning Mary-Mac-Lane-ness would manage to cheat a gallows.\n\nthat it is untrue to life in that instead of writing of it in the true twilit poetry of my own sufficient prose I wrote it in the shallow trick-phrasing of rhyme, a little serenade to the gibbet.\n\nthat it catches and holds my Shadow-self who lives not inside me but beside me: the resembling dissembling shadow I cast when I stand between the daylights of the actual world and the quivering films of the region of dreams.--\n\nMy owned mysteries thrive apace. They are poetry and beauty and loveliness yet they bruise and batter me and split me to atoms. Withal are terrifyingly superfluous: they violently kill the wench to-morrow dawn who died restfully to-day at noon."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "9 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "An ancient witch-light", "text": "Also I am someway the Lesbian woman.\n\nIt is but one phase--one which slightly touches each other phase I own. And in it I am poetic and imaginative and worldly and amorous and gentle and true and strong and weak and ardent and shy and sensitive and generous and morbid and sweet and fine and false.\n\nThe Lesbian sex-strain as an effect is reckoned a prenatal influence--and, as I conceive, it comes also of conglomerate incarnations and their reactions and flare-backs. Of some thus bestowed it makes strange hard highly emotional indefinably vicious women, turbulent and brilliant of mind, mystically overborne, overwrought of heart. They are marvels of perverse barbaric energy. They make with men varied flinty friendships, but to each other they are friends, lovers, victims, preyers, masters, slaves: the flawed fruits of one oblique sex-inherence.\n\nExcept two breeds--the stupid and the narrowly feline--all women have a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant intensive personal taste, the flair of inner-sex, in the tenderest friendships of women.\n\nFor myself, there is no vice in my Lesbian vein. I am too personally fastidious, too temperamentally dishonest, too eerily wavering to walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in freest moods. There is instead a pleasant degeneracy of attitude more debauching to my spirit than any mere trivial traînant vice would be. And a fascination in it tempers my humanness with an evil-feeling power.\n\nI have lightly kissed and been kissed by Lesbian lips in a way which filled my throat with a sudden subtle pagan blood-flavored wistfulness, ruinous and contraband: breath of bewildering demoniac winds smothering mine.\n\nLesbian essence is of mental quality. There are aggressively endowed women whose minds are so bent that they instinctively nurture any element in themselves which is blighting and ill-omened and calamitous in effect. There are some to which the natural inhibition of their own sex is lure and challenge. There are some so solitary by destiny and growth that the first woman-friend who comes into their adolescence with sympathy and understanding wins a passionate Lesbian adoration the deeper for being unrealized. There are some so roiledly giftedly incongruous in trait that they are prone to catch and hold any additional twisted shreds afloat in human air-currents.\n\nEach of those influences biases the Mind of me, which is none the less a clear-visioned mind which rates no thing a truth which it knows to be a lie: though it batten on the lie.\n\n--often here and there around this human world the twisted and perverted and strongly false concepts are the strong actual working facts and the straight road is myth--myth--existent but in visions--\n\nI don’t understand why it’s so: I know it is so.\n\nNot only so with me: so with millions whose stars jangled.\n\nNot always. But often.--\n\nThe deep-dyed Lesbian woman is a creature whose sensibilities are over-balanced: whose imagination moves on mad low-flying wings: whose brain is good: whose predilections are warped: who lives always in unrest: whose inner walls are streaked with garish heathen pigments: whose copious love-instincts are an odd mixture of mirth, malice and luxure.\n\nIts effects in me who am straight-made in nothing, but strongly crooked, is to vivify tenfold or a hundredfold or a thousandfold in my shaded vision the womanness of any woman whose inner or outer beauty arrests and stirs my spirit.\n\nI see in some woman, some girl, any who attracts me--be she a casual acquaintance, or a Victorian poet dead fifty years whose poetry and portrait live, or an actor in a play, or a sweet-browed friend, or an Old Master--I see one such as if all her charm were newly painted and placed near me shining wet with delicate fresh paint. It is bewitching to look at: it has a deep seductive fragrance of smell: it is luxuriantly aromatic to all my known senses--and two senses unknown float from my deeps and rise at it. The Stranger becomes a dearly poignant fancy to dream over. My Friend turns into a vivid goddess whose fingers and hair I would touch tenderly with my lips.\n\nBecause of it a little flame, pale but primal, leaps from the flattest details of life. In such a mood-adventure a window-shutter blooms: a hair-brush glows: a sordid floor has gleams upon it. These bewildering frightful beautifulnesses in this life--.\n\n--withal the same inherence which makes me someway Lesbian makes me the floor of the setting sun--strewn with overflowing gold and green vases of Fire and Turquoise--a sly and piercing annihilation-of-beauty, wonderful devastating to feel--oh, blighting breaking to feel--oh, deathly lovely to feel!--It is the bewitched obliquities that run away with me: grind, gnaw, eat my true human heart like bright potent vitriol.\n\nWhat God means me to do with such gifts and phases--I don’t and don’t understand. I never get anywhere as I think it out. I don’t know shades of rights and wrongs since that ancient witch-light has found more trueness of human feeling in me than has any simplicity my life knows.\n\nIt began, they say, with Sappho and her dreaming students in the long-ago vales of Lesbos. It may be, I daresay. I know it did not stop there. And I know that--Greek, French, Scotch, Indian--Welch--Japanese--all women sense its light lyric touch. For myself, I know only it is part and parcel in my tangled tired coil.\n\nI don’t know whether I am good and sweet in it or evil and untoward.\n\nAnd I don’t care."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "9 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The gray-purple", "text": "Close at the east edge of this Butte is a barren ridge of Rockies that is sudden and big and breathing-looking, barbarously personal, touched with varying gifted color-moods and glowering morose color-passions: at the south the snow-topped Highlands lie long faëry solitary miles away, caressed at their summits by thin soft sun-rings and sun-vapors of salmon and sea-green and turquoise and mauve: at the west a gray-shadowed desert burns red-gold in the setting sun and sleeps in pearl-and-ashen stillness under midnight stars: at the north smaller spurs of the range break into foothills and bluffs and gulches, restful wastes of lonely stones and blurred radiances of tawny sand: on top of all the rarefied air of these plateau heights refracts the light into hot dazzling prisms at any vagrant flash of sun on a trailing storm-fringe. This Butte is capriciously decorated with sweet brilliant metallic orgies of color at any time, all times, as if by whims of pagan gods lightly drunk and lightly mad.\n\nSt. Paul-Minnesota looks a greenlier-prettier town: the Arizona Cañon looks vastly more fearfully beautiful: Wichita-Kansas probably looks more a regular town: Akron-Ohio doubtless looks more Americanly reassuring: Rome-Italy must have a more ‘settled’ look: New York is much larger and much brighter-looking.\n\nOnly this Butte looks deeply and exactly like Butte-Montana.\n\nIts insistent charm is that it goes on strongly resembling itself year after year.\n\nThere is love in me for this Butte.\n\nI am profoundly lonely in it: my life-tissues are long-familiar with the feel of it: its mournful beauty has entered like thin punishing iron into my Soul: and my love for it is made of those things. For no reason I feel love for this Butte.\n\nAs much as for the mountains in their mourning intimateness I feel love for all the outsides and surfaces of the town itself: the stone streets full of houses and shops and stores and brick walls and laundry-wagons and persons: the vacant lots where boys play ball: the school-buildings which for twenty years have needed the same green grass around them and the same playgrounds for school-children to play in (and will go on twenty years needing them): the little mines in unexpected midtown blocks with their engines and hoists and scaffolds and green coppery dumps: the big mines on the Hill busily working day and night, a bristling citadel of smoke-stacks and tall buildings above the treasure-drifts and tunnels that come down honeycombing the town under its streets and hoses and yield up wealths of monthly millions: the desolate wind-swept cemetery on the Flat: the Timber Butte: the School of Mines: the Brophy grocery-window full of attractive grocery-food: the St. Gaudens statue of Marcus Daly: the few sweet green trees on North Montana Street by the court-house: the edge of Walkerville: Ex-Senator Clark’s old-fashioned closed house in Granite Street: the stone Episcopal Church with the memorial windows: the surprising steep Idaho Street hill: the old Reduction Works reminiscent of the bygone Heinze and the bold buccaneering days: the Montana Street cemetery at last kempt and nurtured green as Beloit-Wisconsin: the little rocky Missoula gulch: the North Excelsior Street neighborhood where I wrote my Devil and Gray-dawn book: the Butte High School where I studied and meditated youngly: the old Library where I used to get a variety of books in my gangling girlhood: the electric ore-trains going to Anaconda: the vegetable Chinamen: the Post-Office News-stand: the Mexican tamale venders in the early night: the sweet green trees and other greenness in people’s yards garnered and cherished in a way which would astonish Toledo-Ohio: the brilliant sparkling look of the town from far out on the Flat late in the evening, like a mammoth broken tiara of starry diamonds, twinkling points of blue and orange and cerise and violet, fired and flung against a mountainside of dark velvet,--an aspect intensely Butte: the cool mosquitoless summer nights: the Anaconda Standard: the sulphurous smoky deadly-cold winter mornings: the Cornish and Irish and Austrian and Finn miners: the little slim green onions in the markets: the noise and color and morale of the crowds on a Miner’s Union day: the markets on the afternoon shade side of West Park Street full of crabs and lobsters from Seattle and shining fish from California, and mushrooms and froglegs and squabs and hothouse things from hereabouts: the Parrot smelter: the Chinese gardens at Nine Mile: the Italian village of Meaderville: the fortified battlemented look of the town at the east of South Butte: the mystic familiar sand-and-barrenness--\n\nAll of it has a feel of something aloof and metallic and distinctive and gray-purple and Butte-Montana. Gray-purple is the color of the town, its spirit-tone. Its odor and fascination are gray-purple.\n\nThis Butte is bodily a young rich present-day city of a hundred-thousand population, all told: miners who bulwark its foundations: masses who make and manage its business: millionaire-members who spend most of their lives and dollars in New York: all are Butte-made. But its soul is still the soul of the frontier mining-camp which sprang into copper being when the Comstock mine in Virginia-Nevada failed of its silver-ish promise.\n\nA very few years ago--what one could count on one hand’s fingers--there were no lids in this Butte. Every summer bony thoroughbred horses from Juarez and Denver raced round the oval track on the Flat, watched by a shrieking betting throng of Butte citizens and citizenesses, ridden by silk-bloused black-booted jockies, their finish-spurts under the wire chaperoned by a flock of bookmakers. Roulette and poker and faro were wide-open in the town and flavored the air with a taste of gray-purple hazard. Gin-palaces and mining-camp dance-halls, highly de-luxe’d, lent their tinted breath to the current. Noodle-ish and little bacchanalian dives flourished in unexpected nooks. The police court on a Monday morning resembled the debris from an alcoholic human volcano, a condemned but owned portion of this Butte in its Butte-Montana-ness. All of it was but one element in an isolated prosperous town of many elements, but it someway tinctured all.\n\nNo pagan-wild sunset burst above the west desert but suggested that the vague lid was off the town, and vaguely lost: a lost lid.\n\nThe gambling lid is fast on now--if they gamble they gamble under it. And no more do ribby horses and surprising-mixed crowds disport them at the deserted race-track.\n\nBut the setting Butte sun suggests the same wealth and wildness as if always its celestial chemistry were shot with essence of mining-camp: rich, generous, feverish and virile.\n\nBrophy’s grocery-window and the Marcus Daly monument and the Parrot smelter and the Clark house and the Idaho Street hill--all of it--owns the gray-purple which is not St. Paul and not Wichita and not Pittsburg and not Spokane: not anything except intensely Butte-Montana.\n\nI have felt it since I first lived here in little young short-frocked days, and I felt it when I lived away from Butte: I feel it all these now-days to the roots of myself.\n\nI have no reason: but the contrary: to love Butte as a townful of human beings.\n\nI have no friends in it, no feel-of-friendship, no human friendliness.\n\nAnd the sculpturesque poetry of the outlying deserts and buttes pushes and presses hurtingly upon the lonely and introspective gazer in Body and Soul: I knew it as child and girl and woman.\n\nThere is nothing benign, nothing enlightening--no gentleness, no pity--in its barren beauty. But its hard chaste influence on the sensitive spirit is beyond any analytic power to gauge.\n\nIts wonderful Aridness starves human nerve-soil till the sad wide eyes of the Soul grow bright--fever-bright, light-bright, star-bright--from denial and unconscious prayer: involuntary worship: homage of the unsuppliant unhoping dévotee.\n\nBecause of that--and because of all its long-familiar outsidenesses-- mournful, beautiful, mystic, lavish, madly-mixed, gray-purple--a fascination beyond plaisance or pain--I feel love for this Butte."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "4 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The subdivided cell", "text": "When I was twenty I was one strong Cell firmly, primly closing many little cells different from each other but each greenly intact.\n\nWhen I was thirty the Cell had burst in dusty worldly winds and loosed the little cells. Those in turn had subdivided, losing strength by the cellful but gaining in shadowed truth by a roundabout road. And they showed me my fates and inevitablenesses as in a broad wrecked field misty but plain to view. And thus I see me in the subdivided cells:\n\na piece of a normal woman.\n\na piece of a child.\n\na piece of a poet.\n\na piece of a Lesbian woman.\n\na piece of a writer.\n\na piece of a jester.\n\na piece of a savage.\n\na piece of something someway brave.\n\na piece of a student.\n\na patriotic American.\n\na lump of tiredness.\n\nMy strength is in knowing the evil from the good and the false from the true in it.\n\nMy weakness is in wildly waveringly inclining toward the false.\n\nExcept for love of my country I am ardenter, determinder, stronger in my falseness than in any of my shadowy truth."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "6 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Food and fire", "text": "The first beauty in my life is John Keats.\n\nIn John Keats is my faith in some resurrection.\n\nWithout John Keats human nature feels to be something broken, menacing, unspeakably despicable and lost--lost in the shade. With John Keats the lights break across it and reflect the blazing yellow sun again from eyes and foreheads and fingers and shining hair.\n\nThere are world-and-human things which it thrills me to think about and dwell on: Nathan Hale on the British gallows: the charge of Pickett’s Confederate infantry at Gettysburg: Henry V, prince among kings and men, at Agincourt: Charlotte Corday in prison: Columbus with his felon crews sailing westward: Susan B. Anthony--a woman made in a strange still heroic splendor half-incredible: Alexander Hamilton: Arnold Winkelried: the sea-worn Pilgrim women disembarking into bitter Novemberness.\n\nThose thrill me because they are brave persons and brave things full of idealistic strife: but they still are made of very struggling-garbled world-stuff--they are mere human fabric--till I think of John Keats: and at once they grow informing and eternal.\n\nIn his light the detailed world burns and glows!\n\nJohn Keats! John Keats!--\n\nOther poets have written Nightingales and Grecian Urns and Sonnets and Mirth-and-Passion things: but he wrote them in his glorious and wistful pain. He wrote the sweet headaches of his spirit into his delicate beaten-gold verse: the precious fevers of his mental veins: the bone-aches and muscle-aches of his thoughts: the darling skin-damps and palm-damps of his divine fancy:--all in the Song of his lilied youth.\n\nThere is no poet but writes his poetry out of inner travails and immense wistfulness. But they all write just beside their travail, not in it: just beside their wistfulness, not with it. A poet who feels the throat of his soul aching and swollen and inflamed writes--not just that astral diphtheria, not till another time: but instead the fine smothering of a hope, perhaps, the oblique suffocating of a love. A poet whose brain-hands throb with some horrible dulcet-ish tiredness from handling the heavy bright tools of his craft writes instead the throbbing of his brain-soles and brain-insteps from walking small odd hard rutted daily ways.\n\nIt rouses me--it heats my eyeballs with salty honeyed warmth as I read: but it is not John Keats: who writes his own immediate magic sickness in perfect sudden obvious blood-warm golden Now!\n\nIt is always old, old-fashioned ailment, worn of ages. The drowsy ache of the Nightingale goes a thousand years back and a thousand years to come: the restless ecstasy of a thousand thousand Nightingales, one for each who reads, in any age, all ages. Long, long after the jeweled English language is gone, dead as Homer’s, Keats’s Nightingale will flutter lyric-winged in the nervous jeweled lovely Now.\n\n‘Weep for Adonis,’ wailed the differently-lovely Shelley, ‘he is dead.’ But he isn’t dead. He is terribly living, passionately living.\n\nEach day of my life I feel him living. He breathes. He breathes close to me, pantingly, like a swimmer breasting waves or a playing child in a summer day.--John Keats!\n\nJust Beneath My Skin he is my God-of-the-World, my Fetich and my Lover. He has been my Lover for seven gold years.\n\nHe is the first beauty in my flawed futile life. He is the most beautiful thing in the living and dying world. John Keats--John Keats!--\n\nIn everyone else I can feel mixed motives, tough tangled silk threads of self woven into wonderful wefts of days and deeds: in everybody, from Iscariot to Toussaint L’Ouverture, from Jeanne d’Arc to Victoria Woodhull, from Paul of Tarsus to Aaron Burr.\n\nOnly John Keats stands out alone, a true-breathing Poet, an Inmost Heart bleeding outward.\n\nThe lyric poet is the true poet. The lyric poet achieves no end in his art. He turns fragments of light and life into terms of beauty and sends them flying forth on flaming word-wings which translate the smooth human flesh they brush-by into delicious flesh-of-gold, flesh-of-petals, flesh-of-fire! But he makes no morals, teaches no lessons, finishes nothing. It’s as it should be. Nothing is finished. The mixed world is all unfinished, a glorified Mistake. The race is a millionfold Mistake: lives it, breathes it, battens on it--coarsely and finely and lamentably and musically and bravely. So that all poetry which wanders from the lyric is only a play or a picture or an airship or a cause which aims at fait-accompli, attaining an object: it is limited and man-made: its beauty is lopped off like boughs and branches after a storm: its wings are clipped. Its distanceless spaces, little and large, are visibly engineered by mathematic hands. But the lyric poetry is the true luminous and bloody interpreting of humanness.\n\nJohn Keats wrote by the lights of his living and he lived all his days in joyous lyric anguish.\n\nOnce he wrote, ‘Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.’ It is a factful of himself--lawless, radical and non-civilized, agleam in the mixed world. It is everybody--poets, burglars, nursemaids: everybody. He wrote it in a hundred other ways, but it is all in that: it is the lyric epitome of every day. Pleasure never is at home.\n\nAnd ‘Heard melodies are sweet,’ he wrote, ‘but those unheard are sweeter’--\n\nThere spoke the wild delicate wiseness of his brain and the passionate delicate wonder of his heart.--John Keats! John Keats!\n\nBut everything he wrote, the Grecian Urn itself, is immeasurably less lyric than himself writing it and being it.\n\nHe is rich bright-wet living lyric for this Me in this Now though he has lain dead in Rome nearly the full hundred years.\n\nMy garbled life and my thinking hunger feed upon him.\n\nHe was the one human one who walked on in the way before him: not around the jagged little stones and icy little pools that were in it: but straight on through them all, though his lyric feet were quivering shuddering sensitive, sensitive beyond knowledge of commoner feet that walk around.\n\nIt fattens my leanest self to keep that in my constant remembrance.\n\nThe thought of his brave radiant loveliness reassures me to myself, by the hour.\n\nI am futile: but he is mysteriously omnipotently useful and I catch some of it from him.\n\nI am half-full of vanity: but he is of a lustrous priceless vanity himself that justifies mine and all the world’s.\n\nI am fearing and false: but he is so brave, so true to infinite form, that by it he leavens the lump of the whole world’s mendacious cowardice.\n\nMy brain is full of wilding darknesses, snarled and knotted gifts and penchants: but into his strong brain the strong fresh yellow rain-washed sun shines straight down--through the wide twin-brightness of his Eyes. I look down his Eyes--twin public wells (he belongs publicly and privately to all this mixed mad world, and anyone may look!--)--I look into that titanic vibrant brain, and mine catches some of it: a blest and precious Disease, oh, a rare Disease!\n\nMy Heart--my Heart feels strange and tired and dead, a bit of dead-sea fruit: but his heart, warm and real and boundlessly unsatisfied, is always the deep quick fragrant Rose of this World.\n\nA Hero!--a Poet-at-arms!--John Keats!\n\n‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night,’ wrote that Shelley, and wrote no truer word.\n\nI have read so many of the strange and splendid things--bits of them: Vergil and Homer and Villon and Goethe and all the English poets, and prose writers like Carlyle who in places out-poet poets,--and moderner ones and the new poets, imagists and others: John Keats feels a noticeably braver thing, and always, always a little way beyond. He is purely lyric.\n\nWhen he loved a woman he loved the dubious fascinating Fanny Brawn-- sordid-brained, worldly: to him a mixed living devilish-glowing goddess. A higher-souled woman would neither have so tortured nor so held him. He was purely lyric. He cared truly nothing for the verdicts of critics and reviewers: and in the sweet-lipped boyish beauty of his youth they truly and easily killed him. It would be like that--it had to be. He was so purely lyric.\n\nHe died in the sweet fierce dazzling cause of Beauty.\n\nI have so many thoughts and my thoughts are always my own. There are endless written thoughts deeper than mine--finer, stronger, anything-you-like. But mine answer for me: no written thoughts affect them, though they thrill my reading hours. Only John Keats’s thoughts can enter in and crush and cripple mine.\n\nBecause everybody is a little bit like John Keats I have a starry thin edge of faith inside me. He is food for my hunger of thought, fire for my passion of life.--John Keats!\n\nHe is the resurrection and the life.--\n\nFrom my desk he gazes at me in a frame of old-gold. Every day the sunset on the glass blurs his large mournful joyous eyes with strangest agonized sunset tears: he shows me the sweet, sweet intoxication of his lyric grief.\n\nHe died young, unfinished--and oh, but it’s a shivering ecstasy to think of all those lyrics in him he never wrote!--the sweeter melodies--‘Unheard.’"}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "9 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "The edge of mist-and-silver", "text": "Hidden somewhere in the invisible unused air-plateaus is a little Child: mine: who has never been born.\n\nA tenet in me is that a woman by every right and by old earthen law should, if she will, have her child--should be the warm-winged mother.\n\nI am a devil and a fantasy, a jezebel and a wanderer in fields of inverted fungi: so I seem to me. I do not know my status--I but know my personal incidents as they happen. But I am also woman: a woman by inherence and by fact. Being woman I am the potential mother, mother of my Child who has not been born.\n\nI feel myself a fitting mother.\n\nI am bodily in good health--if not robust yet durable, as a mother should be: I am always tired as if from touches and weights of living as a loving mother should be: I am warm of blood, latently savage-toothed like a jungle-mother, deadlier than the male, as a brave mother should be. Though I have no child I have an ancient right in my Child, and I want my Child. My Child is, but has not been, born. Merely to want my Child makes me a fitting mother.\n\nMy Child often is realer to me than books I read and walks I take and the friend who writes me frequent letters.\n\nSometimes my Child is a soft pink baby smelling of rain-water, milk and flowers: lying close to the curves of my breasts in the hollow of my arms: feeding soft insistent baby hunger and feeding soft strong living hunger of my kissing mother-lips--\n\nMore often my Child is a little happy-voiced fellow, my small brave boy three years old: he clings to my skirt with his sweet tiny hand as we hurry along a frosty pavement in an early December morning. We live in New York in a little common quiet apartment and are gratefully poor, and I work in a factory for a little weekly wage for the living of my little fellow and me. Every day in the early morning we go out to a corner bakery to buy a long crisp loaf of French bread for breakfast. And in the December morning my heart contracts with a sort of happiness and a sort of grief at the sound of little feet in stout shoes yet frail shoes pattering-pattering gaily along beside me on the frosty flagstones. We start out hand-in-hand--his small hand is wonderfully firm and virile--but presently I let go his hand as we hurry along, to feel it instantly clutch the folds of my work-skirt: it pulls and drags at my waistbands and my Heart together with twisted sweetness that makes me ache from head to foot. ‘Mother, wait,’ he says in his happy voice, ‘wait for me.’ But I hurry faster. Always I hurry faster when my happy brave little fellow cries, ‘Wait, mother,’ for the sweet feel of that dragging at my mother-skirt--\n\nMore often my Child is the little girl six years old of the shy eyes and the sun-kissed hair and the firm child-mouth, full of high temper and strong will. All over her is need and demand of her mother to guard and adore and cherish her every moment of her life. We are together in a country field with oak-trees in it, and poplars, and daisies and bluebells and other field-flowers, and it is overgrown with long coarse fragrant wild grass. The noonday sun is bright-hot and I bring my Child there to dry her hair, for I have newly washed it with a square of white soap and a porcelain bluebird bowl: the feel of her small round wilful head was marvelously fulfilling in my cupped hands. She wanders around in the hot-brightness through the tall grass, gathering the hardy scentless field-flowers with her little brown fingers, and she shakes back her beautiful thick short damp curls. I sit on a flat stone like a Sioux squaw and watch her. The grass brushes her bare legs: the magic sun mixed with a faint cool breeze plays upon her head: the tragic delicate music of rustling poplar leaves comes down from tree-tops and catches her in a fairy song-net. She is always very new, very incredible, my Child. She looks toward me with her shy radiant eyes and she says, ‘Mother, look, my hair is nearly dry.’ Her hair is thick and heavy. In my experienced subdued mother-wisdom I know it will not be dry for an hour. I feel the damp of her hair rheumishly keen all over me: a menacingness for me to guard her from: a dear anxiety: an ancient mother-note in the long human gamut of sounds.\n\n--it is precious wearing racking colorful romance to be her mother: each mother-day holds gold-and-blue foreboding: each mother-day holds thin insistent gold-and-purple sorrows: each mother-day holds deep gold-and-gray care, incessant and absolute: an aching wealth of beauty: no more but no less than the damp of her hair in the noonday field. My Child!--herself incessant and absolute: warm pure palpitant gold-of-my-life--\n\nSomeway realer than books I read and walks I take my Child clamors to be born.\n\nMy Child will never be born to any other woman. While she hovers and flutters on the edge of Mist-and-Silver--a border edge--there are ten million fertile hot milk-teeming bodies of women each ready to gather her in and wrap her in delicate-sweet flesh. Ten million other children hovering on the edge will drop off into the ten million matrix-cups--each woman mysteriously a fitting mother so only she wants her baby--though she be, besides, a thief or a traitor or a weakling or a murderer or a harlot or a drunkard or a fool.\n\nLet them come, the ten million. The chrysalid children are clamoring, clamoring always for their birth: a wide ‘melody unheard.’\n\nBut my Child will never drop over the edge to any woman but me. She calls with veiled and dazzling flames of eagerness for her Birthday: but she will await my made-readiness through a long night, though it should last till the day-break of another age. Dimly I weep for her, my needing-me Child. I weep that she must come to this richly-cursed me. But I weep more that I have not got her in this sterile now, where is flawed passionate wealth of intangible life-stuff: but no small round wilful head of hair to wash: no little fellow’s feet on December flagstones and sweet dragging at my skirt: no soft pink-baby hunger--\n\nIt is hunger I feel from her. I feel her always hungry where she is and I can give her no nourishing--no warming food in all my strange unfertile passing life!\n\nIt is that less than my empty arms that makes blurred unrests and writhings in my Dreaming Womb."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "21 January 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A right shape and size", "text": "Sometimes I fancy me married--a responsible wife, a housekeeping matron: with my window-sills full of potted plants.\n\nI have a woman quality which seems uxoresque: I am someway a Right Shape and Size to be somebody’s wife. My bodily and astral dimensions have outlines apparently suitable for something in the married-woman way.\n\nThe wild piquance of being myself--who but for extreme saneness would be mad--rises up and smashes that concept.\n\nBut being a Right Shape and Size I involuntarily imagine it.\n\nFleetingly I imagine a flat in the West Seventies in New York, or a bungalow on the Jersey side, or a middle-sized house in a middle-sized town in Middle-West Illinois--whichever might happen--with me set marriedly down in the midst of it like a suitable maggot in a suitable nut. Suitableness, diametrically opposed to Romance, is its keynote.\n\nI fancy me walking about my married house mornings after breakfast in a neat linen dress and high-heeled satin slippers: snipping dead leaves off my window-sill plants, dusting bits of porcelain, giving my maid some tame household directions. My Body looks slender and supple and newly-married and in-the-drawing in the linen house-dress. The geometric gods regard me with immense satisfaction as being an exact proved theorem. I go to the telephone to order some Little Neck clams and some vermouth cocktails for dinner, and a roast and some Brussels sprouts and the assemblings of a salad: and in it I am ingrainedly domestic, dreadfully useful, a strong pillar of the vast good nice world.\n\nAfternoons I go out to a modiste’s to fit a gown, or to a mild bridge-party along with other suitable women, or to a matinée with a suitable neighbor.\n\nEverything is perfectly right in my insides and in my thoughts: my thoughts run in little troughs in which there is no leakage or deviation, thoughts of a dreadful niceness, thoughts which ever presuppose potted plants on my window-sills.\n\nEvenings I go out with my husband, or sit around with my husband, or take leave of him for a few hours at the hall door.\n\nMy husband would be the sort of man that is called a Good Scout. And he would have married me not for my wistfulness or wickedness or weirdness but for that I am a proper Shape and Size, with a smooth proper covering of flesh, to make a suitable sizable wife. And he would be a heavy grappling anchor to hold me fast in an ocean of domesticness.\n\nMen of the genus Good Scout are all fiercely alike. All women, no matter what their genus, are exceptions to the rule. But men--rich men, poor men, beggar-men, thieves: so only they are Good Scouts--are of marvelous sameness. It comes from the want of minute lifelong pinpricking care of petticoats and potted plants--a detailed intensely personal sort of pain which touches dull solid tones of individuality with vivid various spots of color.\n\nMen are made in ‘job lots’ like their own cravats. Their cravats will differ in texture and color and quality and price. But each one is innately necktie. Use it as a garter or a tourniquet or a strangler’s noose: it still is a man’s deadly necktie. Its use may be ruined but its necktique is deathless. Except poets--and perhaps scientists--men are themselves like that. They cannot get away from the Adam. Nor can women get away from the Eve. But Eve was not a type but a somewhat pleasant human ensemble. While Adam was a type and a sufficiently nasty one: a rotter and a welcher: doubtless the Good Scout type of his day.\n\nA Good Scout is the sort of man who if a woman trusts him with one one-hundredth of her heart will take the whole heart and twist and batter it: and read the paper and smoke his pipe and pay the bills: serenely unaware.\n\nWhich is beside the point in this. For in this image all my marriedness is a thing of outer Shape and Size and Suitableness. The odd but natural sequence is that I make an excellent wife. Excellent is the word. I keep a neat house with no dust left in the corners and no dead leaves on the potted plants. My husband is well looked after as to breakfasts and dinners and bodily comfort, and I am rigidly square with him and chastely true to him.\n\nIf, some dinnertime, as I sit opposite him in a soft pretty chiffon gown, my secret thoughts overflow their troughs and I passionately forget the potted plants and the window-sills and want horribly to rise up and bloodily murder my husband for being such a Good Scout: that would be a genuinely powerless matter, a cobweb trifle, compared with my actual potent Shape and Size which are so suitable for a wife.\n\nI make truly and simply an excellent wife.\n\n--by God and my Soul-and-bones! it would be honester, finer, sweeter--more comfortable to be the dirty beggar-woman in the wet slippery streets--\n\nBut it’s facilely fancied because I am of Right Dimensions to be some Good Scout’s wife.\n\nA curious subtly pitfalled world: in it my Shape and Size, and my Weight which is also Right, could betray me into being an excellent wife: and by that a lying chattel, an inexpressibly damaged woman."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "21 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Ice-water, corrosive acid and human breath", "text": "I have love for two towns. One is this Butte that I tiredly love inside me. And the other is New York that I smoothly love with all my surfaces.\n\nIt is some years--a little lump of years--since I have seen New York: and it is two thousand miles away. So I see and feel its hard sweet lurid magnetism now ten times sharper than when I lived in it. But I felt it sudden and sharp at every turn then. A surface emotion which hits one’s flesh and spreads wide over one’s area is more exciting than a spirit emotion which pierces inward at one tiny point: an ice shower-bath on the white skin is more anguishing than an ice-water drink down the red throat. The spirit emotion lives longer and works more damage and buries itself at last in proud shaded soul-reserves. The surface emotion stays always on the surface and lives actively in the front of one’s senses and musings.\n\nThe feel of New York is a mixture of ice-water, a corrosive acid and human breath sweeping someway warmish against one’s flesh.\n\nIt is immensely ungentle, New York: immensely human: immensely intriguing to all one’s selves. It is too big to have prejudices and traditions of locality: so it leaves its dwellers free, by ones and multitudes, to be human beings.\n\nIn South Bend and Toledo and Beloit and St. Paul and all the tight-built inland towns they murder you with narrowness and harshness and rancorous ill-will: they are scowlingly annoyed with you for making them murder you.\n\nIn New York they murder you with a large soft wave of indifferent insolence--no annoyance, no friction. New York eats you as it eats its dinner, rather liking you.\n\nAnd my love for New York is made of liking: a plaisance of liking.\n\nmade of liking: a plaisance of liking.\n\nI like New York with a charmed restfulness for varied things in it: subways, and Fourth Avenue, and the River, and Fifth Avenue on a sunny October afternoon, and the statue of Nathan Hale, and old cockroachy downtown buildings, and the soft rich whelming creamy boiling-chocolate fragrance from the Huyler factory in Irving Place. And mostly I like it for the people in it--People--Persons--People: they are human beings.\n\nIn the inland towns people are half-afraid of thoughts, half-afraid of spoken words, half-afraid of each other, half-afraid of the fact of being human.\n\nIn New York they are not afraid of any humanness. Even when they are in themselves craven-cowardly, cowardly enough to turn their own stomachs, they still turn their humanness unfearfully face-outward like upturned faces of a pack of cards.\n\nAn Italian organ-grinder grinding out his loud fierce music in a long deep New York side-street is a human organ-grinder: he bestows his rasped melody widely on everybody in ear-shot, not individually--since all around him is a spreading world of strangers--but jointly. So it feels-like.\n\nA beggar-woman at a subway-entrance with a whine and a dirty face and the deadly black cape and chicken-coopish beggar-odor is a human beggar-woman. She throws out an inner savor of herself like a soiled aura on all collectively who pass her. Each-and-all of New York by tolerating and owning her partakes of her mean human essence.\n\nA stout-hearted worn-bodied Jew factory girl working at a hard greasy little machine day after day gives all New York her bit of young virtue which is hardy and heroic and unaware: the whole Island of looseness and vice has an equal gift of impregnable surprising sordid purity thriving on sixes and sevens of poor dollars-a-week.\n\nAll of it is because New York is one Large Condition made of human breaths and the worn scrapings of tired Youth rather than one large town made of individuals and stone houses.\n\nAnd in that is an odd enchantment for me who am born and grown in the places of Half-fear with an old isolated whole fear always on me.\n\nIn New York I am a partaker of that smooth manna of humanness as I am of the air and the sunshine and the little black specks of coal-soot: partly from choice, partly willy-nilly, partly in the sweeping unanalyzable pell-mell-ness of massed human nature.\n\nAnd it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for I don’t like actual human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire.\n\nIt is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of an afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a dress of thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and heart both of which are made of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living. She says, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’ and clasps my hand, and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all but suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet call of depth to depth, and of friendship which by mere force of preference and of our separate quality and calibre is true rather than false. So close and no closer may friendship be. And friendship, with-all, is closer than any love. It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting.\n\nIn a New York doorway I, made in broad loneliness of self, get suddenly companion-warmed at the little pleasant twisted fire of someone else.\n\nIt might be so in some other town, even Beloit, but it feels only like New York to me.\n\nI go in the room where the others are and they say, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’ and I drink some tea and listen and talk in fragments of half-meanings. And I get warmed and half-warmed and cooled and slightly scorched in the easeful unevenly-heated humanness of the women and men sitting around.\n\nIn the inland towns they throw their thoughts and ideas at you at tea-time, inland thoughts and ideas, which hit you and then drop off like little pebbles and nuts and hard green apples.\n\nIn New York they throw those things in the form of long ribbons, heated from being worn next their skin, which fly out and wrap around your skin: pleasantly or foolishly or fancifully.\n\nThe point of it is that nobody is afraid of that.\n\nIt is nothing fulfilling, nothing satisfying. It is merely human. It is half-lyric.\n\nIt reassures me as a person: it makes me feel human in all my surfaces.\n\nWhich are harder to humanize, in everybody, than any deepest deeps.\n\nAnd it is therefore with all my surfaces, smoothly and restfully, I love New York."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "14 March 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "Rhythm", "text": "Now and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its Rhythm.\n\nOften I read the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and feel their truth in the blood-sweating tune of their Rhythm--Rhythm unspeakable and ecstatic.\n\nThe prophet Christ believed himself divine and was all Rhythm in his utterances: and so sounds true as the scheme of digestion and the laws of hygiene.\n\nHe said, Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.\n\nEverybody who has tried it knows that to be true with the flawless Rhythmic truth of health and illness.\n\nMourn frightfully a day and the next day will be a day of soothed warmth and quiet like a grateful pitiful heat current in the breast. Mourn a week and that will come the week following. Mourn a year and the next year will be the year of peace. For anguish: peace. For peace: anguish. It never fails.\n\nThe great thing lacking in Christ, the sense of humor, permitted his perfect personal Rhythm. Humor oddly wants Rhythm. The human race is made in Rhythm like its beating heart: but humor is an ‘extra.’ Everybody is so full of lies that humor, an ‘extra,’ always wonderfully appetizing and out of season, and inexplicably God-given, feels like a great keystone of the race. So it is: but in a lying race. And Christ in his beautiful dual rôle would lack humor. As a God come among the human race to save it, knowing it as he did: his measureless worldly wisdom being paramount even to his gentleness: his mind and his personal tenor could be set only in intense terrific gloom.\n\nThe Rhythm in the Beatitudes is equal Rhythm of sense and Rhythm of sound: Rhythm of music and Rhythm of meaning. Equally, half and half.\n\nThe most Rhythm thing in it is: Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.\n\nI feel it soft-prickling just under my skin. Rhythm--Rhythm and ecstasy!\n\nI have read it many times since I was a child: till I know it in my brain, in my Soul, in my hands, in my breast, in my throat, in my forehead, in my gray eyes, in my aching left foot. I know it and feel it by its Rhythm. There is barbarous justice in it. It cuts everybody off from seeing God.\n\nPure in heart I take to mean pure in motive. A fool has an equal chance with a philosopher: a harlot with a horse-thief: a nasty rag-picker with a small sweet child. But none is pure in motive.\n\nOf other persons I don’t judge. But me I know to be murderously un-pure of heart.\n\nIf I could open a window or unlock a door with only the simple mechanical motive in the act-- But I can’t. There’s a romantic impurity in even the look of my hand as it touches the window-sash or the door-key. There’s a pervasive delicate infusion of impure motive all over me, Soul and bones, as I perform the act. It is one curse in the Necklace which God himself bestowed on me so long ago.\n\nIt is not my fault that I am un-pure in heart.\n\nAnd it is not God’s. It is a comfort to me that I can reason out that it is not God’s fault. He knew I needed the Necklace and each blue-green stone in it to rhyme and balance me. In the wide surprisingness of the universe everything will be rhymed and balanced. In me, being savagely complex, that balancing took a bit of doing: hence my unusual Necklace. It comforts me that I can reach that analytic point. It leaves me a lightning conviction that God is worth seeing.\n\nAnd if a day dawns for me when I can open a door with no ulterior motive: thinking only of the door and the fine small muscular power of smooth hand and supple wrist given me to open it: thinking only that I want to get the door open: then back of that door I know I shall see God!\n\nIt is so written in that barbarous blood-sweating worldly Rhythm on the Mount."}
{"persona": "maclane", "date": "2 February 1917", "synthetic_date": true, "title": "A prayer-feeling", "text": "So it is finished: and I have oddly Failed.\n\nI have slyly Succeeded and oddly Failed in equal degree.\n\nI have Failed because I am too cowardly and too weak and too dishonest to write certain bruised and self-accusing places in my Soul and in my Heart and in my Mind which rightly come in the scope of this: there are the Stern and Delicate Voices one closes one’s ears against: there are the starry grimy Actualities one drops from one’s hands: there are the Thoughts one Does Not Think. Yet and yet: they too are in it, hanging cobweb-ish on my wordings and colons.\n\nIt is not a strong tale, and that is very well. This book is less I-written than it is I-myself. And Just Beneath The Skin no person is strong: not Theodore Roosevelt, true fearless American: not Bonaparte, splendid tyrant: not Joan of Arc, titanic martyr. They are strong in their depths and strong on the outside. So are many others. So am I, I think. But just under the skin all who are human are roundly weak.\n\nRoundly weak, every one.\n\nAnd with that, in my case, False.\n\nThis primarily is the picture of one who is made-False: False from her fingertips to her innermost concept.\n\nIt is belike because of that that this, as itself, oddly Fails.\n\nIt is as if I have made a portrait not of Me, but of a Room I have just quitted. My Gloves are left on a chair: my Hat is left on a couch: my taken-off Shoes are left on the floor: my faint-smelling Handkerchief is dropped by the door: my round ribboned Garter is hanging on the door-knob: my Breath is in the air: my Grief is on the walls clinging like smoke: my flat Despair is on the petunia-leaves in the window: my fragrant Horridness lingers in the curtains. I am not there! But I--I have just Quitted that Room!--\n\nTherein I have slyly Succeeded.\n\n* * * * *\n\nMy feeling at my book’s-end is a prayer-feeling, both frantic and quiet: God have mercy on me! but not unless you want to.\n\nAnd I feel barbarous and utterly solitary, solitary from here to Jericho, solitary from here to the cool stars.\n\nThere comes off the grim gray east hills a soft whelming taste of Sunset, bloody and full of human marrows.\n\nAnd I feel a need of great Pain or great Sin to make and break me, Soul and bones.\n\n[Transcriber’s Notes:\n\nAs the first lines of the paragraphs in the original are not indented, in some cases the presence of a paragraph break is not entirely certain. In such cases, insertion of paragraph breaks was determined according to the structure and content of the surrounding text. Page images of the original are available at the Internet Archive: American Libraries (http://archive.org/details/imarymclanediary00macl).\n\nExcept for the following changes, spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been preserved as printed in the original.\n\nPage 43, comma after “husband’s” was deleted (my husband’s temper). Page 59, “ecstasy” was changed from “esctasy” (hunger and ecstasy). Page 64, “I’d ’a’” was changed from “I’d’ a’”. Page 82, a period was added after “bastard lacy valentines”. Page 96, “Cornwallis” was changed from “Corwallis”. Page 138, “calefacient” was changed from “calefaciant”. Page 142, “listlessly” was changed from “listessly” (I listlessly change). Page 160, “four-and-twenty” was changed from “four-and twenty” (at four-and-twenty). Page 169, “arresting ruination” was changed from “arrest ingruination”. Page 174, “patrician” was changed from “partrician” (slim patrician hands). Page 175, “Mérimée” was changed from “Merimée” (long-adored Mérimée). Page 194, a period was added after “remembrance of myself”. Page 205, “of” was changed from “if” (herself out of it). Page 217, “Soul” was changed from “soul” (Said the Soul: ‘Glad?). Page 227, “philosophers” was changed from “philosphers”. Page 237, an em dash was added before “I keep on”. Page 256, “or” was changed from “of” (or a Blue Shadow). Page 276, “highly” was changed from “hightly” (highly emotional). Page 294, a closing single quotation mark was added after “are sweeter”. Page 300, a comma was added after “little fellow cries”. Page 306, “opposite” was changed from “spposite” (opposite him).]"}