Is it that the reflection is dim and vague, or that our eyes have not yet cleared? Shortsighted people see curious distortions of themselves in the glass.
But it may even be true that no one has yet seen his own face. You can never be sure that what you see in a glass is what other people see in your face. So also in the spiritual mirror of Nature, one seeks to identify oneself and yet never is satisfied. Cheek and nose are wandering with the ripples of the lake. Every pool in the marsh has its star reflections, and as you bend o’er one of them your visage is broken by the starlight.
On the desolate North Cape, amid ice floes and leaping seals, with the bleak homeless winds of the Arctic about your ears, you are as near to your own image as in the warmth of Gibraltar’s opening gates. In the center of the Great Pyramid your heart turns to dust, but coming forth it vivifies again and is young as the year of your age. Pharaoh’s uncovered face is a faded hieroglyphic, but still it asks thousands of years after death—who am I; whither do I go?
So life’s scroll is full of question marks, pointers, index fingers, records of bearings, soundings, answers and partial answers to the question: Where am I? Drake climbs a goodlie and high tree in Darien and descries afar the Southern Sea. It is a picture in his artist’s notebook. Such an artistic thing to do, and life made him do it! It was no pose, his going forth to singe the King of Spain’s beard. It was more of a pose, I think, when he refused to allow his game of bowls to be interrupted by the approach of the Armada.
Pose is, unfortunately, a prevalent disease of the quest. Some natures are betrayed to striking attitudes on the top of molehills. To-day I conquered the Mendips; henceforth there are no Mendips. But good hard, earnest living—tramping and seeking, will cure most people of the false theatrical. Beware of going to Jerusalem in order that you may come back and tell the world you have been. It spoils all you found on the way. I do not like the palmers; those who have been and have come back. Admitted that it is a vice of ourselves, we professional littéraires, we go and then partially spill over when we return, selling the wine of experience for so much. When it is genuine experience you well may:
Wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the goods they sell.
But, of course, one can tell one’s story and yet escape pose. “Make thyself small,” saith Buddha. Make thyself unobtrusive, lest some one may think that a very ornate and luxurious loud speaker is responsible for the music itself. In an old-fashioned phrase so difficult to stomach nowadays—“Give God the glory.”
The personal diary, however, that daybook of the soul, is not meant for other gaze. I should imagine oneself shy even of the eyes of one’s most intimate friend, wife, sweetheart, alter ego. There is a delicacy, a secrecy about the functions of mind and soul. You do not wish others to see what you have written and blush at the thought of half a line being read over your shoulder. And the better the diary is kept the more private and personal it becomes.
I do not consider Pepys’ Diary to be the type of a good daybook, though it is extremely valuable as a record of the life of the age in which Pepys lived. It is one of the great curiosities of literature. As after a lifelong imprisonment one might find the diary of a prisoner, written to kill time, so after Pepys’ life one finds this astonishing document, wherein as it were, all is written down. But that all of Pepys’ Diary is not all. It is all that is immaterial. There is much that escaped Pepys because he was not on the lookout for it. The chief omissions are the answers or attempted answers to the questions: “Who was Pepys? Whom did Pepys think he was?” The answers to these questions covering the whole of Pepys’ life could well occupy as much space as the famous diary we have.