Havana, Tuesday, April 9, 1912, 12:30 A. M.
Somebody has said, “War is hell.” I say, “Life is Hell,” with a capital H. God! but I would not have believed it possible a few years ago that a man could go through such prolonged mental agony. Am I a degenerate? Is there some insidious form of insanity slowly creeping over me? Gautier has said that nothing is beyond words. I deny this—I could be as eloquent as ever man was, have as fine a command of language, be as fluent, brilliant as the best of the masters; but I could not describe the agony of the past few weeks.
It is not alone the nervousness, loneliness, and the old tired feeling; the sudden bursts of enthusiasm, followed by strange periods of peculiar calmness, now peaceful, now raging, now with an unholy joy in I know not what; then black despair seemingly without cause, it is more than this. Self-consciousness to an extreme, fight it as I will, and yet a deep absorption in anything which really interests me so that I lose my identity in it. Thus my deep love for the theatre, even moving picture dramas, for the strong stories of love, passion and mental states of the French writers, little as I have read of them. If I could always find something to interest me the solution might be at hand, but with the same dreary prospect of day after day of hell, hell, hell (the other word for business to an artistic temperament), how can I get a night’s rest? I lie awake and go through all the hot passions, wild enthusiasms, ecstatic feelings, morbid thoughts, wrath at the existing order of things. I damn everything, and yet I realize how futile my scheme of life would be for others.
Since I last wrote I had started afresh. I have three times lost control over myself, and but an hour ago, the last time. It is terrible. With such noble thoughts that come upon me sometimes, such beautiful ideas when I feel in tune with everything in the world, and then always the hellish reaction. Oh, God! what a sorry mess you have made of things. How could you do it? You have made a terrible mistake—to make me such a shattered wreck before I was out of my youth; to take from me everything, strip me naked so that I can say now that I am absolutely indifferent to everything except to express myself before I die. That idea has taken possession of me. If only I can write such a book as will express all these mad imaginings, hopeless longings, the void in my life, complete absence of feminine companionship, doubly trying to one of my hot passionate moods. Harlots disgust me increasingly. It is not morality, for I have come to the state where things are not moral and immoral—they are just so. I would not consider it immoral to-night, for instance, to have intercourse with a girl who pleased me, but I cannot sacrifice what I have in me on the couch of one who sells her passion. I want love, if I understand it aright. And yet this is not an ever-consuming passion. I had just as much, or nearly so much, longing for education up till lately, and have only dropped the idea of going to college because I feel the approach of dissolution unless I can get up north, rouse my physical self and mayhap feel for once physically fit. Lately I have realized that there is something deeper than I before realized in all these things. My brain is over-tired, fagged out, wearied with too much thought, worry, reading, hate, fear—I know not what—but a change must come soon. It cannot go on. Perhaps there is something organically wrong with me—God, if you exist, you should have given me some manly vigor commensurate with the mental strength I imagine I have, and after all, is my mind weak or has my poor, weak body and abuse merely dragged it down, and is it capable of resurrection? It seems impossible that I should be born to get so near to some things which touch the deepest strings of human conduct, the deepest emotions of heart and brain, to have such a keen sense of humor, to see the tragedy underlying it all, to feel a sympathetic note with the foibles and weaknesses of others, even as I laugh at them or become cynical about them, to walk by the sea and drink in her varying moods, the misty ethereal early mornings, the calmness of gradually settling twilight on a day when the waves scarcely ripple, the blood-red sunsets with ever-changing cloud effects; the deep, mysterious shadows on a dark night, with the moon reflected from behind the clouds; the night when the moon is in her glory; the day when an overcast sky symbolizes my overcast soul. These and more have I thrilled with, and all for naught. Give me but strength for a few more years and I will vindicate myself; but I must break away from this agony soon, overpowering, overwhelming—Why, O God?