January 22d.
Oh why do those publishers take so long! I wait and yearn; I grow sick with waiting and yearning.
I never allowed any weakness in my soul before; I never made any terms with it. I blamed everything upon myself. And now that my whole life is weakness and misery, I writhe and struggle—I turn back always on myself, suspecting myself, blaming myself. I can not lay it to the world, I can not get into the habit—it is such a miserable habit! How many millions there are of them—poor, querulous wretches, blaming their fate, crying out against the world's injustice and neglect—crying out against the need of working, wishing for this and that—discontented, impotent, miserable! Oh my God—and I am one of such!
I can not bear the sound of my own voice when I complain! I hear the world answering me—and I take the part of the world! “Why don't you be a man and go out and earn your way? Why don't you face your fate? You prate about your message—what business has a man with a message that is too much for him? What business have you with weakness—what excuse have you for weakness?”
And so I came to see it. The world is right and I am all wrong! And the truth of it burns me like an acid in my brain.
January 24th.
And all the time my whole being is still restless with the storms that raged in it last spring! I have all those memories, all that poignancy. I can not realize it—any of what I was and had—but I know it as a fact, a memory, and I crouch and tremble, I grow sick with it.
Why don't they write to me? My money is going!