—, Sunday, June 1, 1913.
This morning, the beginning of week and month, and the first real spring Sunday of the season, I once more start on a process of rehabilitation. For three years I have been fighting my sexual passions. Previous to May 21, 1910, as I note from that date in my diary, I was clean absolutely, as I have said before. Three years of the fiercest action and reaction. Despair to the verge of suicide, exultation to such heights of ecstasy that Heaven opened its gates almost. And in between indifference, or simply dull care, daily monotonous, hopeless toil, restless, tired nights.
I lived over the date set for my suicide, May 10th, this year. Every month I determined to start in anew, practically every month for these three years. At the first of the years 1911, 1912 and 1913; at birthdays May 10, 1911, 1912 and 1913, Leap-year, February 29, 1912, and after every despair I started in anew with the determination to not only conquer that weakness, but to restrain myself in speech and act sufficiently . . . . ahead and accomplish something.
Failure has been the result every time. I ask myself why, and the answers are many and various, according to the last disappointment.
In a large measure it has been due to that emptiness of my life, to the lack of affection and a definite ambition, and to my not being more positive instead of attempting to be merely negatively virtuous or self-controlled (as I don’t like the word virtuous), combined with nervousness, strong passions and emotional qualities with no proper outlet for them when they became so put up as to threaten to overflow.
To-day I begin on a new ground, that of being positive and rigidly self-controlled until I feel I can relax with impunity. I have tried relaxing before after a week, two weeks, but one relaxation in word or act has been followed by others until the circle has been completed by a blind unreasoning yield to the sexual impulse under conditions of mental chaos and physical exhaustion, and then new resolutions and reaction set in.
I would go far to state that it is different now, but so repeatedly and in such a series of shocks has the lesson been driven home, that I have simply in desperation put suicide on one side and restraint on the other, and, realizing that it is impossible to go on as I have been doing, I have, with all the remaining strength, passion, love, honor, or whatever
is left in me, ambition and enthusiasm, and the like, determined once and for all and for one year at least to be absolutely ascetic as the first step. To restrain myself all around is, of course, the next, and I will succeed fairly well.
The big questions of sex I leave open. I must get an impersonal view away from the conflict first.
Philosophy I also leave open, tentatively adopting the simple formula from that of the superman, the will to live because life is painful and the will to power, endeavoring to thrust out everything that makes for weakness.