My Scotch blood added to my genius sense has made me into a dangerous chemical compound. By analyzing I have brought an almost clear portrait of myself up before my mind’s eyes.
When I was a child I did not analyze knowingly, but the child was this same genius, though I am one of the kind that changes widely and decidedly in the years. This weary unhappiness is not a matter of development.
When I was a child I felt dumbly what I feel now less dumbly. At the age of five I used sometimes to weep silently in the night—I did not know why. It was that I felt my aloneness, my foreignness to all things. I felt the heavy, heavy weight of life—and I was only five.
I was only five, and it seems a thousand years ago. But sometimes back through the long, winding, unused passages of my mind I hear that silent sobbing of the child and the unarmed wailing of a tiny, tired soul.
It mingles with the bitter Nothingness of the grown young woman, and oh, with it all—with it all I am so unhappy!
There is something subtly Scotch in all this.
But Scotch or Indian or Japanese, there is no stopping of the pain.
[March 22.]
I FEAR, do you know, fine world, that you do not yet know me really well—particularly me of the flesh. Me of the peculiar philosophy and the unhappy spirit you know rather well by now, unless you are stupider than I think you are. But you might pass me in the street—you might spend the day with me—and never suspect that I am I. Though for the matter of that, even if I had set before you a most graphic and minutely drawn portrait of myself, I am certainly clever enough to act a quite different rôle if I chose—when you came to spend the day. Still, if the world at large is to know me as I desire it to know me without ever seeing me, I shall have to bring myself into closer personal range with it—and you may rise in your seats and focus your opera-glasses, stare with open mouths, stand on your hind-legs and gape—I will myself turn on glaring green and orange lights from the wings.