Sometimes a lamp upon the point of expiration flares up for a final second.
Then, with a splutter, it goes out. And in the circle of confining glass a dull red glow fades, disappears, and only an ugly, lifeless black circle of exhausted wick is left.
I didn't mean in making these notes—confound Morton Sims that he should have suggested such a thing to me!—Well, I didn't mean to bring in any daily happenings. My only idea was, for a sort of pitiful satisfaction to myself, to make a record of what I am going through. It has been a relief to me—that is quite certain. While I have been writing these notes I have had some of the placidity and quiet that I used to know when I was engaged upon purely literary pursuits. I can't write now—that is to say, I can't create. My poetic faculty seems quite to have left me. I write certain letters, to a certain person, but they are no longer the artistic and literary productions that they were in the first stages of my acquaintance with this person.
All the music that God gave me is gone out of me now.
Well, even this relief is passing, I have more in my mind and heart than will allow me to continue this fugitive journal.
Here, obviously, Lothian makes a slight reference to the ghastly obsession which, at this time, must have had him well within its grip.
Well, I will round it up with a few final words.
One thing that strikes me with horror and astonishment is that I have become quite unable to understand how what I am doing, the fact of what I have become, hurts, wounds and makes other people unhappy. I try to put myself—sympathetically—in the place of those who are around me and who must necessarily suffer by my behaviour. I can't do it. When I try to do it my mind seems full of grey wool. The other people seem a hundred miles away. Their sentiments, emotions, wishes—their love for me . . .
It is significant that here Lothian uses the plural pronoun as if he was afraid of the singular.