<|entry|>
5 January 1889.
We ought also to have a portrait of Seurat by himself.

I wrote to G. that when I suggested an exchange of portraits between us, I had naturally taken it for granted that he and B. had made studies of each other; and that as this did not prove to be the case, and that he had painted one specially for me, I could not accept this picture in exchange, as I regarded it as too important a work of art for the purpose. Nevertheless, he replied that I absolutely must accept it in exchange, and his letter contained a host of compliments which, as they were undeserved, I pass over.
<|/entry|><|entry|>
11 June 1889.
I am sending you an article about Provence which, in my opinion is well written. The “Félibres” are a literary and artistic society, composed of Clovis Hugues, Mistral, and others, who write excellent sonnets in the Provençal dialect and in French. If ever the “Félibres” deign to take any notice of me here, they will all come into my little house. But I should like this to occur only when I have finished my decorations. As I love Provence just as whole-heartedly as they do, I feel that I have some right to their consideration. If ever I avail myself of this right, it will be in order that my pictures may remain here or in Marseilles, where, as you know, I should like to work. For the artists of Marseilles would do well to continue the work begun by their fellow-townsman Monticelli. If G. or I were to write an article for one of the local papers here, it would suffice to open up relations with them.

I must tell you that I have made a very interesting expedition through various local farm properties, in the company of some one who knows this part of the country very well. They are all small peasant holdings, _à la_ Millet, translated into Provençal. M. K. and B. cannot make head or tail of it all, and even though I am beginning to feel a little clearer in regard to it all, I should have to live here a jolly long time in order to be able to paint it.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
[Prompt: Write until something true appears.]
27 August 1663.
Up, after much pleasant talke with my wife and a little that vexes me, for I see that she is confirmed in it that all that I do is by design, and that my very keeping of the house in dirt, and the doing of this and any thing else in the house, is but to find her employment to keep her within and from minding of her pleasure, in which, though I am sorry to see she minds it, is true enough in a great degree. To my office, and there we sat and despatched much business. Home and dined with my wife well, and then up and made clean my closet of books, and had my chamber a third time made very clean, so that it is now in a very fine condition. Thence down to see some good plank in the river with Sir W. Batten and back again, it being a very cold day and a cold wind. Home again, and after seeing Sir W. Pen, to my office, and there till late doing of business, being mightily encouraged by every body that I meet withal upon the ‘Change and every where else, that I am taken notice of for a man that do the King’s business wholly and well. For which the Lord be praised, for I know no honour I desire more. Home to supper, where I find my house very clean from top to bottom again to my great content. I found a feacho (as he calls it) of fine sugar and a case of orange-flower water come from Mr. Cocke, of Lisbon, the fruits of my last year’s service to him, which I did in great justice to the man, a perfect stranger. He sends it me desiring that I would not let Sir J. Minnes know it, from whom he expected to have found the service done that he had from me, from whom he could expect nothing, and the other failed him, and would have done I am sure to this day had not I brought it to some end. After supper to bed.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|maclane|>
28 February 1901.
To-day when I walked over my sand and barrenness I felt Infinite Grief.

Everything is beyond me.

Nothing is mine.

My single friendship shines brightly before me, and is fascinating--and always just out of my reach.

I want the love and sympathy of human beings, and I repel human beings.

Yes, I repel human beings.

There is something about me that faintly and finely and unmistakably repels.

When my Happiness comes, shall I be able to have it? Shall I ever have anything?

This 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.

There is no ridding myself of it. There is no ridding myself of it. There is no ridding myself of it.

Oh, I am damned--damned!

There 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.

You are saying to yourself that I imagine this.

What 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.

There 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?

This follows me incessantly. It is burning like a smouldering fire every hour of my life.

Oh, deep black Despair!

How I suffer, how I suffer--just in being alive.

I feel Infinite Grief.

Oh, Infinite Grief----
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|vangogh|>
21 March 1885.
Very often I am obsessed by the discomfiting feeling that we are both being duped by Messrs. B. V. and Co. But I try to quell this feeling.{Z} Above all, do not let them make you their dupe.... This is enough for to-day.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
20 July 1668.
Up, and to the office, where Mrs. Daniel comes.... All the morning at the office. Dined at home, then with Mr. Colvill to the new Excise Office in Aldersgate Street, and thence back to the Old Exchange, to see a very noble fine lady I spied as I went through, in coming; and there took occasion to buy some gloves, and admire her, and a mighty fine fair lady indeed she was. Thence idling all the afternoon to Duck Lane, and there saw my bookseller’s moher, but get no ground there yet; and here saw Mrs. Michell’s daughter married newly to a bookseller, and she proves a comely little grave woman. So to visit my Lord Crew, who is very sick, to great danger, by an irisipulus;----the first day I heard of it, and so home, and took occasion to buy a rest for my espinette at the ironmonger’s by Holborn Conduit, where the fair pretty woman is that I have lately observed there, and she is pretty, and je credo vain enough. Thence home and busy till night, and so to bed.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
16 April 1669.
Up, and to my chamber, where with Mr. Gibson all the morning, and there by noon did almost finish what I had to write about the Administration of the Office to present to the Duke of York, and my wife being gone abroad with W. Hewer, to see the new play to-day, at the Duke of York’s house, “Guzman,” I dined alone with my people, and in the afternoon away by coach to White Hall; and there the Office attended the Duke of York; and being despatched pretty soon, and told that we should not wait on the King, as intended, till Sunday, I thence presently to the Duke of York’s playhouse, and there, in the 18d. seat, did get room to see almost three acts of the play; but it seemed to me but very ordinary. After the play done, I into the pit, and there find my wife and W. Hewer; and Sheres got to them, which, so jealous is my nature, did trouble me, though my judgment tells me there is no hurt in it, on neither side; but here I did meet with Shadwell, the poet, who, to my great wonder, do tell me that my Lord of did write this play, trying what he could do in comedy, since his heroique plays could do no more wonders. This do trouble me; for it is as mean a thing, and so he says, as hath been upon the stage a great while; and Harris, who hath no part in it, did come to me, and told me in discourse that he was glad of it, it being a play that will not take. Thence home, and to my business at the office, to finish it, but was in great pain about yesterday still, lest my wife should have sent her porter to enquire anything, though for my heart I cannot see it possible how anything could be discovered of it, but yet such is fear as to render me full of doubt and disgust. At night to supper and to bed.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|pepys|>
18 April 1669.
(Lord’s day). Up, and all the morning till 2 o’clock at my Office, with Gibson and Tom, about drawing up fair my discourse of the Administration of the Navy, and then, Mr. Spong being come to dine with me, I in to dinner, and then out to my Office again, to examine the fair draught; and so borrowing Sir J. Minnes’s coach, he going with Colonel Middleton, I to White Hall, where we all met and did sign it and then to my Lord Arlington’s, where the King, and the Duke of York, and Prince Rupert, as also Ormond and the two Secretaries, with my Lord Ashly and Sir T. Clifton was. And there, by and by, being called in, Mr. Williamson did read over our paper, which was in a letter to the Duke of York, bound up in a book with the Duke of York’s Book of Instructions. He read it well; and, after read, we were bid to withdraw, nothing being at all said to it. And by and by we were called in again, and nothing said to that business; but another begun, about the state of this year’s action, and our wants of money, as I had stated the same lately to our Treasurers; which I was bid, and did largely, and with great content, open. And having so done, we all withdrew, and left them to debate our supply of money; to which, being called in, and referred to attend on the Lords of the Treasury, we all departed. And I only staid in the House till the Council rose; and then to the Duke of York, who in the Duchess’s chamber come to me, and told me that the book was there left with my Lord Arlington, for any of the Lords to view that had a mind, and to prepare and present to the King what they had to say in writing, to any part of it, which is all we can desire, and so that rested. The Duke of York then went to other talk; and by and by comes the Prince of Tuscany to visit him, and the Duchess; and I find that he do still remain incognito, and so intends to do all the time he stays here, for avoiding trouble to the King and himself, and expence also to both. Thence I to White Hall Gate, thinking to have found Sir J. Minnes’s coach staying for me; but, not being there, and this being the first day of rain we have had many a day, the streets being as dusty as in summer, I forced to walk to my cozen Turner’s, and there find my wife newly gone home, which vexed me, and so I, having kissed and taken leave of Betty, who goes to Putney to school to-morrow, I walked through the rain to the Temple, and there, with much ado, got a coach, and so home, and there to supper, and Pelling comes to us, and after much talk, we parted, and to bed.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|pepys|>
19 April 1669.
Up, and with Tom (whom, with his wife, I, and my wife, had this morning taken occasion to tell that I did intend to give him L40 for himself, and L20 to his wife, towards their setting out in the world, and that my wife would give her L20 more, that she might have as much to begin with as he) by coach to White Hall, and there having set him work in the Robe Chamber, to write something for me, I to Westminster Hall, and there walked from 10 o’clock to past 12, expecting to have met Deb., but whether she had been there before, and missing me went away, or is prevented in coming, and hath no mind to come to me (the last whereof, as being most pleasing, as shewing most modesty, I should be most glad of), I know not, but she not then appearing, I being tired with walking went home, and my wife being all day at Jane’s, helping her, as she said, to cut out linen and other things belonging to her new condition, I after dinner out again, and, calling for my coach, which was at the coachmaker’s, and hath been for these two or three days, to be new painted, and the window-frames gilt against May-day, went on with my hackney to White Hall, and thence by water to Westminster Hall, and there did beckon to Doll Lane, now Mrs. Powell, as she would have herself called, and went to her sister Martin’s lodgings, the first time I have been there these eight or ten months, I think, and her sister being gone to Portsmouth to her Y husband, I did stay and talk and drink with Doll.... So away:; and to White Hall, and there took my own coach, which was now come, and so away home, and there to do business, and my wife being come home we to talk and to sup, there having been nothing yet like discovery in my wife of what hath lately passed with me about Deb., and so with great content to bed
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
9 January 1917.
An ancient witch-light
Also I am someway the Lesbian woman.

It 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.

The 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.

Except 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.

For 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.

I 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.

Lesbian 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.

Each 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.

--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--

I don’t understand why it’s so: I know it is so.

Not only so with me: so with millions whose stars jangled.

Not always. But often.--

The 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.

Its 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.

I 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.

Because 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--.

--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.

What 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.

It 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.

I don’t know whether I am good and sweet in it or evil and untoward.

And I don’t care.
<|/entry|><|entry|>
9 March 1917.
The gray-purple
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.

St. 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.

Only this Butte looks deeply and exactly like Butte-Montana.

Its insistent charm is that it goes on strongly resembling itself year after year.

There is love in me for this Butte.

I 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.

As 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--

All 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.

This 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.

A 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.

No pagan-wild sunset burst above the west desert but suggested that the vague lid was off the town, and vaguely lost: a lost lid.

The 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.

But 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.

Brophy’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.

I 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.

I have no reason: but the contrary: to love Butte as a townful of human beings.

I have no friends in it, no feel-of-friendship, no human friendliness.

And 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.

There 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.

Its 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.

Because 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.
<|/entry|><|entry|>
4 March 1917.
The subdivided cell
When I was twenty I was one strong Cell firmly, primly closing many little cells different from each other but each greenly intact.

When 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:

a piece of a normal woman.

a piece of a child.

a piece of a poet.

a piece of a Lesbian woman.

a piece of a writer.

a piece of a jester.

a piece of a savage.

a piece of something someway brave.

a piece of a student.

a patriotic American.

a lump of tiredness.

My strength is in knowing the evil from the good and the false from the true in it.

My weakness is in wildly waveringly inclining toward the false.

Except for love of my country I am ardenter, determinder, stronger in my falseness than in any of my shadowy truth.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
17 February 1917.
Late afternoon
Last night as I slept I dreamed a vivid dream.

I 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:

LATE AFTERNOON.

They’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.

They’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.

There’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.

For days I charmedly dwelt on death-- I raved at death--I swore-- Till vexédly death waived the date: And came this Day-Before.

From being lured with artful thoughts My life abortive grew. From being broached in livid mood My death aborted too.

To-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.

Three oddnesses are in that dream:

that it is true to life in that I in my lightning Mary-Mac-Lane-ness would manage to cheat a gallows.

that 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.

that 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.--

My 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.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
28 January 1667.
Up, and down to the Old Swan, and there drank at Michell’s and saw Betty, and so took boat and to the Temple, and thence to my tailor’s and other places about business in my way to Westminster, where I spent the morning at the Lords’ House door, to hear the conference between the two Houses about my Lord Mordaunt, of which there was great expectation, many hundreds of people coming to hear it. But, when they come, the Lords did insist upon my Lord Mordaunt’s having leave to sit upon a stool uncovered within their burr, and that he should have counsel, which the Commons would not suffer, but desired leave to report their Lordships’ resolution to the House of Commons; and so parted for this day, which troubled me, I having by this means lost the whole day. Here I hear from Mr. Hayes that Prince Rupert is very bad still, and so bad, that he do now yield to be trepanned. It seems, as Dr. Clerke also tells me, it is a clap of the pox which he got about twelve years ago, and hath eaten to his head and come through his scull, so his scull must be opened, and there is great fear of him. Much work I find there is to do in the two Houses in a little time, and much difference there is between the two Houses in many things to be reconciled; as in the Bill for examining our accounts; Lord Mordaunt’s Bill for building the City, and several others. A little before noon I went to the Swan and eat a bit of meat, thinking I should have had occasion to have stayed long at the house, but I did not, but so home by coach, calling at Broad Street and taking the goldsmith home with me, and paid him L15 15s. for my silver standish. He tells me gold holds up its price still, and did desire me to let him have what old 20s. pieces I have, and he would give me 3s. 2d. change for each. He gone, I to the office, where business all the afternoon, and at night comes Mr. Gawden at my desire to me, and to-morrow I shall pay him some money, and shall see what present he will make me, the hopes of which do make me to part with my money out of my chest, which I should not otherwise do, but lest this alteration in the Controller’s office should occasion my losing my concernment in the Victualling, and so he have no more need of me. He gone, I to the office again, having come thence home with him to talk, and so after a little more business I to supper. I then sent for Mercer, and began to teach her “It is decreed,” which will please me well, and so after supper and reading a little, and my wife’s cutting off my hair short, which is grown too long upon my crown of my head, I to bed. I met this day in Westminster Hall Sir W. Batten and W. Pen, and the latter since our falling out the other day do look mighty reservedly upon me, and still he shall do so for me, for I will be hanged before I seek to him, unless I see I need it.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
8 November 1662.
All the morning sitting at the office, and after that dined alone at home, and so to the office again till 9 o’clock, being loth to go home, the house is so dirty, and my wife at my brother’s. So home and to bed.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|pepys|>
16 November 1662.
(Lord’s day). About 3 o’clock in the morning waked with a rude noise among Sir J. Minnes his servants (he not being yet come to his lodgings), who are the rudest people but they that lived before, one Mrs. Davis, that ever I knew in my life. To sleep again, and after long talking pleasantly with my wife, up and to church, where Mrs. Goodyer, now Mrs. Buckworth, was churched. I love the woman for her gravity above any in the parish. So home and to dinner with my wife with great content, and after dinner walked up and down my house, which is now almost finished, there being nothing to do but the glazier and furniture to put up. By and by comes Tom, and after a little talk I with him towards his end, but seeing many strangers and coaches coming to our church, and finding that it was a sermon to be preached by a probationer for the Turkey Company,----to be sent to Smyrna, I returned thither. And several Turkey merchants filled all the best pews (and some in ours) in the Church, but a most pitiful sermon it was upon a text in Zachariah, and a great time he spent to show whose son Zachary was, and to prove Malachi to be the last prophet before John the Baptist. Home and to see Sir W. Pen, who gets strength, but still keeps his bed. Then home and to my office to do some business there, and so home to supper and to bed.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|pepys|>
25 November 1662.
Up and to the office all the morning, and at noon with the rest, by Mr. Holy, the ironmonger’s invitation, to the Dolphin, to a venison pasty, very good, and rare at this time of the year, and thence by coach with Mr. Coventry as far as the Temple, and thence to Greatorex’s, where I staid and talked with him, and got him to mend my pocket ruler for me, and so by coach to my Lord’s lodging, where I sat with Mr. Moore by appointment, making up accounts for my Lord Sandwich, which done he and I and Capt. Ferrers and W. Howe very merry a good while in the great dining room, and so it being late and my Lord not coming in, I by coach to the Temple, and thence walked home, and so to my study to do some business, and then home and to bed. Great talk among people how some of the Fanatiques do say that the end of the world is at hand, and that next Tuesday is to be the day. Against which, whenever it shall be, good God fit us all.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
[Prompt: What do you want?]
23 March 1665.
Up and to my Lord Sandwich, who follows the Duke this day by water down to the Hope, where “The Prince” lies. He received me, busy as he was, with mighty kindness and joy at my promotions; telling me most largely how the Duke hath expressed on all occasions his good opinion of my service and love for me. I paid my thanks and acknowledgement to him; and so back home, where at the office all the morning. At noon to the ‘Change. Home, and Lewellin dined with me. Thence abroad, carried my wife to Westminster by coach, I to the Swan, Herbert’s, and there had much of the good company of Sarah and to my wish, and then to see Mrs. Martin, who was very kind, three weeks of her month of lying in is over. So took up my wife and home, and at my office a while, and thence to supper and to bed. Great talk of noises of guns heard at Deale, but nothing particularly whether in earnest or not.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
3 October 1666.
Waked betimes, mightily troubled in mind, and in the most true trouble that I ever was in my life, saving in the business last year of the East India prizes. So up, and with Mr. Hater and W. Hewer and Griffin to consider of our business, and books and papers necessary for this examination; and by and by, by eight o’clock, comes Birch, the first, with the lists and books of accounts delivered in. He calls me to work, and there he and I begun, when, by and by, comes Garraway,

the first time I ever saw him, and Sir W. Thompson and Mr. Boscawen. They to it, and I did make shift to answer them better than I expected. Sir W. Batten, Lord Bruncker, W. Pen, come in, but presently went out; and J. Minnes come in, and said two or three words from the purpose, but to do hurt; and so away he went also, and left me all the morning with them alone to stand or fall. At noon Sir W. Batten comes to them to invite them (though fast day) to dinner, which they did, and good company they were, but especially Garraway. Here I have news brought me of my father’s coming to town, and I presently to him, glad to see him, poor man, he being come to town unexpectedly to see us and the city. I could not stay with him, but after dinner to work again, only the Committee and I, till dark night, and by that time they cast up all the lists, and found out what the medium of men was borne all the war, of all sorts, and ended with good peace, and much seeming satisfaction; but I find them wise and reserved, and instructed to hit all our blots, as among others, that we reckon the ships full manned from the beginning. They gone, and my heart eased of a great deale of fear and pain, and reckoning myself to come off with victory, because not overcome in anything or much foiled, I away to Sir W. Coventry’s chamber, but he not within, then to White Hall, and there among the ladies, and saw my Lady Castlemaine never looked so ill, nor Mrs. Stewart neither, as in this plain, natural dress. I was not pleased with either of them. Away, not finding W. Coventry, and so home, and there find my father and my brother come to towne--my father without my expectation; but glad I am to see him. And so to supper with him, and to work again at the office; then home, to set up all my folio books, which are come home gilt on the backs, very handsome to the eye, and then at midnight to bed. This night W. Pen told me W. Batten swears he will have nothing to do with the Privateer if his son do not go Lieutenant, which angers me and him; but we will be even with him, one way or other.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|pepys|>
9 October 1666.
Up and to the office, where we sat the first day since the fire, I think. At noon home, and my uncle Thomas was there, and dined with my brother and I (my father and I were gone abroad), and then to the office again in the afternoon, and there close all day long, and did much business. At night to Sir W. Batten, where Sir R. Ford did occasion some discourse of sending a convoy to the Maderas; and this did put us upon some new thoughts of sending our privateer thither on merchants’ accounts, which I have more mind to, the profit being certain and occasion honest withall. So home, and to supper with my father, and then to set my remainder of my books gilt in order with much pleasure, and so late to bed.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
11 March 1662.
At the office all the morning, and all the afternoon rummaging of papers in my chamber, and tearing some and sorting others till late at night, and so to bed, my wife being not well all this day. This afternoon Mrs. Turner and The. came to see me, her mother not having been abroad many a day before, but now is pretty well again and has made me one of the first visits.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
30 January 1901.
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.

My brain is one kind of devil’s workshop, and it is as incessantly hard-worked and always-busy a one as you could imagine.

It 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.

I try always to give the Devil his due--and particularly in this Portrayal.

There are very few who give the Devil his due in this world of hypocrites.

I 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?

Periodically 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!

“What would you have me do, little MacLane?” the Devil would say.

“I would have you conquer me, crush me, know me,” I would answer.

“What shall I say to you?” the Devil would ask.

“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.”

“What would you have me do, little MacLane?” he would say again.

I 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!”

“How shall I treat you, little MacLane?”

“Treat me cruelly, brutally.”

“How long shall I stay with you?”

“Through the life everlasting--it will be as one day; or for one day--it will be as the life everlasting.”

“And what kind of children will you bear me, little MacLane?” he would say.

“I will bear wonderful, beautiful children--with great pain.”

“But you hate pain,” the Devil will say, “and when you are in your pain you will hate me.”

“But no,” I will answer, “pain that comes of you whom I love will be ineffable exaltation.”

“And how will you treat me, little MacLane?”

“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!”

“Indeed you are rarely sweet,” the Devil will say. And I will be in transports.

Oh, Devil, Devil, Devil!

Oh, misery, misery of Nothingness!

The days are long--long and very weary as I await the Devil’s coming.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
23 February 1667.
This day I am, by the blessing of God, 34 years old, in very good health and mind’s content, and in condition of estate much beyond whatever my friends could expect of a child of theirs, this day 34 years. The Lord’s name be praised! and may I be ever thankful for it. Up betimes to the office, in order to my letter to the Duke of York to-morrow, and then the office met and spent the greatest part about this letter. At noon home to dinner, and then to the office again very close at it all the day till midnight, making an end and writing fair this great letter and other things to my full content, it abundantly providing for the vindication of this office, whatever the success be of our wants of money. This evening Sir W. Batten come to me to the office on purpose, out of spleen (of which he is full to Carcasse!), to tell me that he is now informed of many double tickets now found of Carcasses making which quite overthrows him. It is strange to see how, though I do believe this fellow to be a rogue, and could be contented to have him removed, yet to see him persecuted by Sir W. Batten, who is as bad himself, and that with so much rancour, I am almost the fellow’s friend. But this good I shall have from it, that the differences between Sir W. Batten and my Lord Bruncker will do me no hurt.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
21 February 1919.
All these two years I have been obsessed by the fear of death. This grew and grew and grew gigantic, and this it was that made me cling so, I think. Ten days ago it went, I care no more. It leaves me perfectly cold. . . . Life either stays or goes.

I must put down here a dream. The first night I was in bed here, i.e. after my first day in bed, I went to sleep. And suddenly I felt my whole body breaking up. It broke up with a violent shock — an earthquake — and it broke like glass. A long terrible shiver, you understand — the spinal cord and the bones and every bit and particle quaking. It sounded in my ears a low, confused din, and there was a sense of floating greenish brilliance, like broken glass. When I woke I thought that there had been a violent earthquake. But all was still. It slowly dawned upon me — the conviction that in that dream I died. I shall go on living now — it may be for months, or for weeks or days or hours. Time is not. In that dream I died. The spirit that is the enemy of death and quakes so and is so tenacious was shaken out of me. I am (December 15, 1919) a dead woman, and I don't care. It might comfort others to know that one gives up caring; but they'd not believe any more than I did until it happened. And, oh, how strong was its hold upon me! How I adored life and dreaded death!
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
3 April 1914.
Went for a walk by the river this evening and watched the boats. Two had red sails and one had white. The trees are budding almost before one's eyes in this warm weather — big white buds like birds on

A Moral Victory

the chestnut trees, and round trees just sprinkled with green. The world is exceedingly lovely. My letter to L.M. was a great effort. She seemed somehow 'out of the running.' But then so does everybody. I feel a real horror of people closing over me. I could not bear them. I wish I lived on a barge, with J. for a husband and a little boy for a son.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|mansfield|>
[Prompt: What do you keep returning to?]
October 1922.
The Luxembourg Gardens. A very small railway train came along, with a wooden whistle. First it stopped, blew the whistle, and then moved slowly forward with a wonderfully expressive motion of the right arm. People mattered not at all. It went through them, past them; skirted them. Then down it fell, full length. But two gentlemen picked it up, patted its behind, and in a minute it whistled (rather longer than usual) and started off again. . . .

A little bird-like mother with a baby in her arm, and tugging at one hand a minute little girl in a coat made out of a pleated skirt, and a pink bow — it looked like pink flannel — on her clubbed hair. A very rich child in a white beaver hat passed and fell quite in love with the pink flannel bow. When its nurse was not looking it hung back and walked beside its little poor sister, looking at her wonderingly and very carefully keeping step.

A little person in a pink hat passed, very carefully dragging a minute doll's pram. It was so minute she had to drag it on a thread of cotton. Naturally, once she stopped looking and her hand gave a jerk, down fell the pram. For about two minutes she dragged it along on its side. Then she discovered the accident, rushed back, set it up, and looked round very angrily in all directions: certain some enemy had knocked it over on purpose. Her little dark direct gaze was quite frightening. Did she see some one?
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|mansfield|>
30 May 1919.
First comes L.M. I give her orders. Ask her to supervise the maid till Monday. 'Be gentle with her: help her to make the beds; and just tell her how

A Good Beginning

everything must be.' Then in detail I sketch out the maid's programme. 'Send Ralph, please.' Ralph arrives. I arrange the food. Then settle all that must be done, coercing Ralph, putting her mind in order if I can, making her see the bright side of things, sending her away (I hope) feeling important and happy.

I go upstairs to see Maud, to say good-morning, to hope 'she will be happy.' "Just take things gently; I'll quite understand that you can't get into our ways at once. Ask Miss B. and the cook for what you want. But if you wish to see me, don't hesitate to come in. I was so glad you were early." She was very reassured. Her eyes shone (she's only a little girl). She said it was like the country. As she walked up from the tram the birds sang "something beautiful." This instead of the 'long drag up the hill' was cheering. I left her happy. I know I did.

Downstairs just to say Good-day to Mrs. Moody and to say there were some flowers for her to take home. The good creature was on her knees polishing and saying it was such a fine day. Bless her 60 years! We had a little joke or two and I came away.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|mansfield|>
14 February 1915.
I have been, in addition, waiting for A. all the afternoon. I thought, even in this storm, she'd "blow over." "Hillo!" And about 100 A.s with quick deliberate steps have walked up this brick path but got no further. Plus that, I have nothing to read. Hurrah!!!

One's salvation would I think be music. To have a 'cello again. That I must try. . . .

June 20th. The twentieth of June 1918.

C'est de la misère.

Non, pas ça exactement. Il y a quelque chose — une profonde malaise me suive comme un ombre.

Oh, why write bad French? Why write at all? 1,500 miles are so many — too many by 11,449 for me.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|vangogh|>
18 September 1882.
As I promised to write to you, I shall at once begin by saying that the country in these parts seems to me just as beautiful as Japan, as far as the clearness of the air and the cheerful colouring are concerned. In the landscape the water looks like sheets of fine emerald or of a rich blue of the shade with which we are familiar in crape prints.[23] Pale sunsets make the ground appear quite blue. Glorious golden suns! And I have not yet seen the country in the usual splendour of its summer garb. The costume of the women is pretty, and on Sundays especially very simple and happy combinations of colour may be seen on the boulevard. And there can be no doubt that in summer things will be even gayer still. I only regret that living here is not so cheap as I had hoped it would be, and up to the present I have not succeeded in finding such inexpensive quarters as are to be found in Pont-Aven. At first I had to pay five francs a day, and now I pay four. If one could only speak the local dialect and eat _bouillabaisse_ and _aioli_, one might certainly find an inexpensive pension in Arles.... Even if the Japanese do not make any headway in their own land, their art is certainly being continued in France. At the beginning of this letter I send you a small sketch of a study on which I am now engaged, and of which I should like to make something. Seamen with their sweethearts are going to the town, which, with its drawbridge, stands in wonderful outline against the yellow disc of the sun. I have also another study of the same drawbridge, with a group of washerwomen.

I should be very glad to have a word from you, just to know how you are and where you are going. With best wishes to you and our friends.

Your old friend

VINCENT.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|vangogh|>
15 October 1882.
I have just read a book about the Marquesas Islands. It was neither beautiful nor well-written, but it was heartrending inasmuch as it described the extermination of a whole tribe of aborigines--_cannibals_! They were cannibals in the sense that they ate one man, say once a month (what did that matter?)

The thoroughly Christian whites could think of no better way of putting an end to this barbarity, which on the whole was only mildly bloodthirsty, than by exterminating not only the tribe of aboriginal cannibals, but also the tribe with which they used to fight the battles calculated to provide both sides with the necessary prisoners of war to be eaten.

Then the two islands were annexed, and since then they have been unspeakably gloomy!

These tattooed races, niggers, Indians--everything, everything is either disappearing or degenerating. And the dreadful white man with his brandy, his purse, and his syphilis!--when will the world have had enough of him? The horrible white man, with his hypocrisy, his lust of gold, his sterility! And these poor savages were so full of gentleness and love!

There is real poetry in Gauguin’s negresses. And everything that comes from his brush has something charming, something heartrending and astounding about it. He is not yet understood, and he suffers greatly from not being able to sell his work like other true poets.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|vangogh|>
3 December 1882.
I have just taken a house. It is painted yellow outside and whitewashed within, and it stands right in the sun.

I have painted the following still-life: a blue-enamelled coffee pot, a royal blue cup and saucer, a milk jug decorated with pale-cobalt and white squares, a vase with a blue and orange pattern on a white ground and a blue majolica pot decorated with pink flowers and greeny brown leaves, the whole upon a blue tablecloth against a yellow background. There are in addition two oranges and three lemons. The result is a symphony of blue tones, animated by a scale of yellows ranging to orange. And I have another still-life: lemons in a basket against a yellow background. Besides this, a view of Arles. Of the town itself only a few red roofs and a tower are visible, the rest is hidden by the foliage of fig trees, all of it quite in the background, and a thin strip of blue sky above. The town is surrounded by meadows covered with dandelions,{B} a sea of gold. Right in the foreground a ditch which is full of purple irises cuts through the meadows. While I was busy painting this view, the grass was cut, that is why it is only a study and not the finished picture I intended it to be. But what a lovely theme--eh? A sea of yellow flowers with the reef of purple irises, and in the background the charming little town with its beautiful women!

I grow ever more and more convinced that the pictures which ought to be painted, the pictures which will be necessary and inevitable if painting is ever to attain to the serene heights of Greek sculpture, German music and French fiction, will be beyond the strength of one individual. They will therefore have to be executed by a group of painters, who will collaborate in order to carry out an idea which they hold in common. Suppose, for instance, that this man were a brilliant colourist who lacked ideas, while another overflowed with a number of perfectly new, harrowing, or charming inspirations, which, however he did not know how to express adequately. This would be a sufficient reason to deplore the absence of _esprit de corps_ among artists, who criticize and persecute one another, though fortunately without being able to exterminate their kind. You probably think this is all very trivial? Who knows? But the thing itself, the possibility of a Renaissance, is surely no trivial matter!

I often feel very sorry that I cannot induce myself to work more at home, from imagination. Imagination is surely a faculty that one should develop; for it alone enables us to create a more inspiring and comforting world than we can apprehend by means of a fleeting glance at reality, which is for ever changing and which vanishes like a flash of lightning. How glad I should be one day to try to paint the starry heavens as also a meadow studded with dandelions in the sunlight. But how can one ever hope to succeed in doing these things unless one resolves to stay at home and to work from imagination?

In painting I observe no system; I lash the canvas with irregular strokes and let them stand. Impasto--bare patches here and there--some places left quite unfinished--others overpainted--brutal touches, and the result is (at least I must assume that this is so) sufficiently disconcerting and irritating to displease people who have pre-conceived notions about technique.{C}

When I paint direct from nature, I always try to seize what is essential by means of line. Then I fill up the defined spaces (whether they have been expressed or not; for they have been felt at all events) with simple flat tones as follows: all ground or soil will contain the same violet tone, practically the whole of the sky will be kept blue in tone, while foliage will be blue-green or yellow-green (either the blue or the yellow may be deliberately intensified) in short, no photographic imitation, that is the chief thing!
<|/entry|><|entry|><|vangogh|>
25 August 1882.
Here is a question of technique for you! Just tell me your view of the matter! I wish to put black and white, as I buy them at the colourman’s, boldly on my palette, and to use them as they are. If in a green park with pink footpaths, I see (please to remember that I have in mind the Japanese method of flat simple colouring) a man dressed in black--a magistrate, for instance, reading the “Intransigeant,” and the sky above him is pure cobalt, why on earth should I not paint the said legal gentleman in pure black, and the “Intransigeant” in pure white?

For the Japanese pays no heed to the play of light, and paints flat tones one beside the other--characteristic lines, which seize the movement or the form in a simple manner.

Now, apropos of another idea: in a scheme of colour which contains a golden evening sky, for instance, one might at a pinch paint a crude white wall against the sky with pure white, or with the same crude white modified by a neutral tone; for the sky itself will lend it a pale mauve tinge.

In this very simple landscape, consisting of a completely white cottage (even the roof is whitewashed), standing on orange-coloured ground (for the southern sky and the Mediterranean both tend to produce very intense orange colouring, as their blue is very strong), the black note of the door, the window and the small cross on the roof makes a contrast of black and white, which is just as agreeable to the eye as the contrast of orange and blue.

On the same principle, here is another still more amusing theme: a woman in a black and white check dress, standing in the same simple landscape, with the sky blue, and the ground orange. The black and the white can quite adequately play the part of colours (at least, in many cases they may be considered as such), for their contrast is just as piquant as that of green and red, for instance. Moreover, the Japanese made use of the same tones; with magic beauty they render the dull pale complexion of a little girl and its fetching contrast with her black hair, by means of four strokes of the pen on white paper; and they do the same thing with their black bramble bushes, which they cover with countless white flowers.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
8 October 1663.
So, keeping myself warm, to the office, and at noon home to dinner, my pain coming again by breaking no wind nor having any stool. So to Mr. Holliard, and by his direction, he assuring me that it is nothing of the stone, but only my constitution being costive, and that, and cold from without, breeding and keeping the wind, I took some powder that he did give me in white wine, and sat late up, till past eleven at night, with my wife in my chamber till it had done working, which was so weakly that I could hardly tell whether it did work or no. My mayds being at this time in great dirt towards getting of all my house clean, and weary and having a great deal of work to do therein to-morrow and next day, were gone to bed before my wife and I, who also do lie in our room more like beasts than Christians, but that is only in order to having of the house shortly in a cleaner, or rather very clean condition. Some ease I had so long as this did keep my body loose, and I slept well.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|pepys|>
19 May 1669.
With my coach to St. James’s; and there finding the Duke of York gone to muster his men, in Hyde Park, I alone with my boy thither, and there saw more, walking out of my coach as other gentlemen did, of a soldier’s trade, than ever I did in my life: the men being mighty fine, and their Commanders, particularly the Duke of Monmouth; but me-thought their trade but very easy as to the mustering of their men, and the men but indifferently ready to perform what was commanded, in the handling of their arms. Here the news was first talked of Harry Killigrew’s being wounded in nine places last night, by footmen, in the highway, going from the Park in a hackney-coach towards Hammersmith, to his house at Turnham Greene: they being supposed to be my Lady Shrewsbury’s men, she being by, in her coach with six horses; upon an old grudge of his saying openly that he had lain with her. Thence by and by to White Hall, and there I waited upon the King and Queen all dinner-time, in the Queen’s lodgings, she being in her white pinner and apron, like a woman with child; and she seemed handsomer plain so, than dressed. And by and by, dinner done, I out, and to walk in the Gallery, for the Duke of York’s coming out; and there, meeting Mr. May, he took me down about four o’clock to Mr. Chevins’s lodgings, and all alone did get me a dish of cold chickens, and good wine; and I dined like a prince, being before very hungry and empty. By and by the Duke of York comes, and readily took me to his closet, and received my petition, and discoursed about my eyes, and pitied me, and with much kindness did give me his consent to be absent, and approved of my proposition to go into Holland to observe things there, of the Navy; but would first ask the King’s leave, which he anon did, and did tell me that the King would be a good master to me, these were his words, about my eyes, and do like of my going into Holland, but do advise that nobody should know of my going thither, but pretend that I did go into the country somewhere, which I liked well. Glad of this, I home, and thence took out my wife, and to Mr. Holliard’s about a swelling in her cheek, but he not at home, and so round by Islington and eat and drink, and so home, and after supper to bed. In discourse this afternoon, the Duke of York did tell me that he was the most amazed at one thing just now, that ever he was in his life, which was, that the Duke of Buckingham did just now come into the Queen’s bed-chamber, where the King was, and much mixed company, and among others, Tom Killigrew, the father of Harry, who was last night wounded so as to be in danger of death, and his man is quite dead; and there in discourse did say that he had spoke with some one that was by (which all the world must know that it must be his whore, my Lady Shrewsbury), who says that they did not mean to hurt, but beat him, and that he did run first at them with his sword; so that he do hereby clearly discover that he knows who did it, and is of conspiracy with them, being of known conspiracy with her, which the Duke of York did seem to be pleased with, and said it might, perhaps, cost him his life in the House of Lords; and I find was mightily pleased with it, saying it was the most impudent thing, as well as the most foolish, that ever he knew man do in all his life.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
19 January 1917.
To express me
I suppose I’m very lonely.

It 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.

But for want of--other, other people--I am intensely lonely.

When 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.

Now 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.

At eighteen I said to me: ‘I’m lonely but some day I may be happily friendshiped and apprehended and it will be like paradise.’

Now 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--?’

It’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.

It 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.

Four-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.

It 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.

It 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.’

It makes my life-space someway sweet, someway heartbreaking, someway frightful--strewn with dust of broken stars.

I 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.

To 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.

I 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.

But 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.

It is a being cruel and transfiguring and terrifying: terribly worth clasping close and breathing with.

And some days it sleeps, sleeps like the dead: it is delicater than rose-vapors before the dawn: a sun-blown faëry thing.

When it sleeps I’m left alone. Then comes a doubtful dreadful quiet, a hell of dumbness that only God could reach.

It is as if neither God nor I attempts to cope with it.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
24 November 1668.
Up, and at the Office all the morning, and at noon home to dinner, where Mr. Gentleman, the cook, and an old woman, his third or fourth wife, come and dined with us, to enquire about a ticket of his son’s, that is dead; and after dinner, I with Mr. Hosier to my closet, to discourse of the business of balancing Storekeeper’s accounts, which he hath taken great pains in reducing to a method, to my great satisfaction; and I shall be glad both for the King’s sake and his, that the thing may be put in practice, and will do my part to promote it. That done, he gone, I to the Office, where busy till night; and then with comfort to sit with my wife, and get her to read to me, and so to supper, and to bed, with my mind at mighty ease.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
15 March 1901.
In these days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.

My 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.

I shall never forget you, my sand and barrenness.

Some 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?

It may be.

But 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.

And so then I shall remember it.

As 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.

It is beyond me, and it is nothing to me.

In my intensest desires--in my widest longings--I never go beyond self. The ego is the all.

Limitless 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.

But my two hands are apart, and clasped together in an agony of loneliness.

I 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.

To 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!

Perhaps a woman--a real woman--could do this.

But I?--No. I am not real--I do not seem real to myself. In such things as these my life is a blank.

There 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.

To suffer and do and die for love of something! It is glorious! What must be the exalted ecstasy of Charlotte Corday’s soul now!

And I--with all my manifold passions--I am a coward.

I 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?

But they are not real.

They fade away--they fade away.

And again come the varied phenomena of my life to bewilder and terrify me.

Confusion! Chaos! Damnation! They are not moments of exaltation now. Poor little Mary MacLane!

“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.”

I do not know what to do.

I do not know what were good to do.

I would do nothing if I knew.

I might add to my litany this: Most kind Devil, deliver me--from myself.
<|/entry|><|entry|>
16 March 1901.
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.

Then 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.

My soul said to me: “I am sick.”

I answered: “And I am sick.”

“We may be well,” said my soul. “Why are we not well?”

“How may we be well?” I asked.

“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.”

“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.”

My 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.”

“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.”

“I will keep my one atom of faith,” said my soul.

“But lie and sleep now,” I said. “Don’t reach after that Light any more. Let us both sleep a few years.”

“No,” said my soul.

“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.”

“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.”

I 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!

My soul, with its one pitiful atom of faith, looked only what it was--a weeping, hunted thing.
<|/entry|><|entry|>
17 March 1901.
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.

A great inner languor comes like a giant and lays hold of me. I lie fallow beneath it.

Some one forgot me in the giving of things. But it does not matter. I feel nothing.

Persons say to me, don’t analyze any more and you will not be unhappy.

When 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.

This is great wisdom and fine, clear logic.

It is a pity that no one has ever yet been able to live by it.

But after all it’s no matter. Nothing is any one’s affair. It is all of no consequence.

And have I not had all my anguish for nothing? I am a fool--a fool.

A 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.

Nothing counts. Nothing can possibly count.

Regret, 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.

All 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.

Something within me shrieks now, but I do not know what it is--nor why it shrieks.

It groans and moans.

There is no satisfaction in being a fool--no satisfaction at all.
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
22 September 1885.
If our hopes do not prove false--which I am convinced they will not--and the impressionist pictures rise in price, we ought to paint a large number and avoid selling them too cheaply. This is one more reason for being careful of the quality and for losing no time. Then in a few years I see the possibility of holding the disbursed capital, if not in money, in any case in treasure, in our own hands.
<|/entry|><|entry|>
3 April 1885.
I am convinced that in this place nature seems to have been made for the very purpose of being painted chromatically, and that is why the chances of my ever being led away from the spot, grow fewer every day.
<|/entry|><|entry|>
9 March 1885.
The studio is in such a prominent position here that I do not think my establishment is likely to attract any female; and an affair with a petticoat might too easily lead to a binding relationship. Moreover, it seems to me as if the morality here were far more human and natural than in Paris. But with my temperament it would be impossible to lead a loose life and to work as well, and circumstances being as they are, one must be content to paint pictures, which is by no means real happiness or real life. But, after all, even the artistic life, though we know it is artificial, seems to me so vigorous and vital, that we should be ungrateful not to be satisfied with it.
<|/entry|><|entry|>
16 July 1885.
At Claude Monet’s you will see some beautiful things, and what I am sending you will appear bad beside them. I am dissatisfied with myself and with my work; but I see the possibility of doing better in the future. Later on, I hope that other artists will appear in this beautiful land, who will create an art like that which the Japanese have created in their own country; and to pave the way to this is not so bad after all.

I feel certain that I shall always love the scenery of this place. It is like Japanese art, once it has found a place in one’s heart one can never cast it out.{Y}
<|/entry|>


<|entry|>
15 January 1919.
When I read Dr. Johnson, I feel like a little girl sitting at the same table. My eyes grow round. I don't only listen; I take him in immensely.

"Don't you think it would be marvellous," she said, "to have just one person in one's life to whom one could tell everything?" She leant forward, put down her cup, but stayed bent forward touching the spoon against the saucer. She looked up — "Or is it just childish of me — just absurd to want such a thing?... All the same," she leaned back, smiling, "childish or not — how wonderful it would be — how wonderful! to feel — from this person, this one person — I really don't need to hide anything. It would be such heavenly happiness!" she cried, suddenly, "it would make life so..." she got up, went to the window, looked out vaguely and turned round again. She laughed. "It's a queer thing," she said, "I've always believed in the possibility — and yet — in reality... Take R. and me, for instance." And here she flung back in a chair and leant back, still she was laughing but her body leaned to the chair as though exhausted. "I tell him everything. You know we're... rather different from most people. What I mean is — don't laugh — we love each other simply tremendously — we're everything to each other! In fact he's the one person on earth for me — and yet," and she shut her eyes and bit her lip as though she wanted to stop
<|/entry|>


<|entry|><|maclane|>
7 February 1917.
A wild mare
Also I am dissatisfying to myself.

My thoughts smother me: they keep me from life.

I 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.

And 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.

That I gaze inward at the garbled biograph of Me keeps me from several sorts of violent action.

I have violent action in me, chained in analysis.

Most 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.

It’s but little like that with me. There would be point and purpose in my Action. But it is kept in stupor by analysis.

I am malcontent about that, though I live upon analysis. I hate the inaction and inertia that follow on its heels.

I 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.’

There 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.

But, 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.

It isn’t that I haven’t the guts. I have.

I am a wild mare in foal: and unfoaling.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|maclane|>
23 March 1917.
The mist
Because I am to myself someways dissatisfying and exasperating often this thing I write is dissatisfying and exasperating.

It is a true account of what is inside me. ‘The wine must taste of its own grapes.’

It 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.

I could write myself as a pretty dainty harmlessly purring one--the leopard with claws clipped and fangs drawn.

When my dynamos rest I am like that, doubtless.

But the wears and tears of breathing and the influences of varied life-details and of clothes worn and food eaten start me moving devilishly.

Phases of a score of persons, men and women, come to light in me.

To be one human being means to be monstrously mixed.

I write me out not as I might be, nor as I should be--whatever that may be--: but merely as I am.

As, Just Beneath The Skin, I am.

So my written account must come out someways dissatisfying and exasperating. Logically dissatisfying and divinely and ethically exasperating.

--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--

I only know I write me as clearly as I see me, considering the Mist.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|maclane|>
15 February 1917.
A white liner
To-day came the Finn woman and cleaned my blue-and-white bedroom.

She comes now and again and cleans excellently.

I would like to clean my room myself but lack the strength and skill to do it well.

But 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.

I like to watch her and talk with her a bit and dwell on her mixed potentialities. She contrasts fascinatingly with me.

She 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.

Her name is Josephina and she looks as if it might be.

Mine is Mary MacLane but I don’t look entirely like it.

She lives a lonely life and so do I, differing in sort and circumstance.

I am middle-class and American of Canadian reminiscence, and early-thirty.

Josephina is Finn and lower-class with a ‘foreign’ look, and she is forty-five and looks sixty and is twelve years out of Finland.

I am tallish and slim and weigh nine wavering stone.

The Finn woman is short and solid and weighs all of a hundred and seventy pounds.

I am slender of flank and ankle, narrow through the loins and bony at the shoulders.

The Finn woman is thick everywhere, broad of girth and deep of chest like a Percheron stallion.

I am darkish with dusky gray eyes.

Josephina is dirty-blond with pale narrow blue eyes like a china doll’s.

My sex feels to me like a mysterious sweetness.

Josephina’s sex looks porcinely obvious and uninteresting like her large dubious breasts.

I am inwardly full of strong-flavored emotions.

The one positive outward feeling Josephina manifests is a dull but comprehensive hatred, peculiar to her nationality and station, for everything Swedish.

The Finn woman has a husband now and had a different one formerly.

I have none and never had.

Josephina is elemental primeval woman.

So am I but terrifically qualified by complexity, incongruity.

I have white smooth firm beautiful hands.

Josephina’s hands are particularly ugly and have a menacing look.

I have quick intelligence.

Josephina is markedly stupid.

I live in a quiet clean bungalow.

Josephina lives in an unusually filthy unrestful little house.

I own two dresses whose personnel alters at intervals.

Josephina owns one unchanging dress, septic, maculate and repellent.

I have a sense of humor vivid and intriguing to myself.

Josephina has no more sense of humor than a flatiron.

I bathe foamily icily each morning.

Josephina 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.

I 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.

The Finn woman owns about the same thing in a life which may be more still and flawed than mine: her love for strong drink.

There begins a curious line of similitude between us.

I feel oddly joyous and light of heart on a solitary veranda corner with the John-Keats poetry book open in my lap.

And 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.

In 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.

I like to think there’s the same ambrosial food in the Demon Rum for Josephina as in the Grecian Urn for me.

There seems no other pleasure in life for her.

The limit of her literary pursuit is the reading of a four-page Finnish newspaper full of obituaries.

The opalescent enchantments of her inner being mean nothing to her: she wouldn’t know her entity from her duodenum.

Her 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.

A sunset above the western peaks is less than a setting sun to her.

Her food is merely her fodder.

Love 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.

She has nor chick nor child to mother.

Her 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.

Other roads being thus blocked it is sing-ho for King Alcohol in pint bottles.

Josephina 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.

By the same token I eschew many a tame poet: I must have John Keats.

What the poetry of John Keats does to me I know.

What 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.

She 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.

Because 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.

Before 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!

Into 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!

Nearing 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.

A 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.

The 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.

I 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.

Josephina 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.

But the Demon Rum looses a heated flood of poetry upon her, which I can but vision and not feel.

I am incapable of strong drink even as Josephina is incapable of John Keats.

We are quits there.

I look on myself as the more fortunate.--John Keats!

A 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--

But 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?

A 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.

--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.

It would be a book savoring not of white alcohol but of the salty unshed Tears, the dry artistic Griefs of Josephina.
<|/entry|><|entry|><|maclane|>
7 January 1917.
Beneficent bedlam
I have been so long Sane it would be gay and sweet and resting to go Mad.

I would I could go Mad.

To 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.

It is the thing one escapes by going Mad: Monotony.

It’s all beneficent bedlam.
<|/entry|>