[My damns]
To-morrow
I BEAR the detailed infliction of being a person with a tired mixture of patience and indifference and scorn.
I say on Monday, Damn the ache in my left foot: on Tuesday, Damn that rattling window—I hate it: on Wednesday, Damn this yellow garter—it’s too tight: on Thursday, Damn my futile life: on Friday, Damn the solitude: on Saturday, Damn these thoughts: on Sunday, Damn my two dresses.
But I pronounce each day’s Damn in a half-perfunctory half-preoccupied tone, more from duty and fitness than from conviction. I intently mean each Damn, but the scornful indifferent patience which is my spirit-essence leavens each one. I swear at my life’s perversities with only a fatigued contempt due partly to bodily fragileness but mostly to a cold continently reckless mood which is clasped on me like a strong stupefied devil-fish. In this mood I should murmur the same gelded Damn if I found myself penniless and foodless in strange streets: if I became suddenly deaf: if my Body were being lashed with whips or raped by a Mexican bandit. I should murmur the same worn Damn if I were this moment on a gallows with the rope around my neck and life were dearly madly precious.
I mark that with my musing regrets. I remember in the strong young furies of eighteen each new day of my life was filled with passionate poetic blasphemy, protests and rebellions of youth. Those were not tired, not acquiescent, not indifferent to slings-and-arrows, but firey-blooded quick-pulsed breathless brave young Damns.
There is splendor in being brave in a fighting attitude, but in being brave through indifference there is no splendor.
But it is only toward calamity and adversity and worldly untowardness that I feel indifferent. Fighting blood is stirred in me if not against the hated things then for the loved things. I could fight and I could die, and love it, to save poet-lusters, poet-fineness, poet-beauty from the world’s flat griefs. In that, which I feel warm and real and sparkling in my blood, in some splendor for me.
—and also I could die for my country: and there is fighting hatred stirred in me against its foes—