To-day I have reviewed the situation carefully, exhaustively. I have peered into every aspect of my life and achievements and everything I have seen nauseates me. I can find no ray of comfort in anything I have done or in anything I might do. My life seems to have been a wilderness of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very beginning. At the moment of my birth I was coming into the world in the wrong place and under wrong conditions. Why seek to overcome such colossal initial disadvantages? In this mood I found fault with my parentage, my inheritance, all my mental and physical disabilities....
This must be a form of incipient insanity. Even as a boy, I can remember being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing cross-examinations—no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more mercilessly. After a day of this sort of thing, when silently and morbidly in every spare moment, at meals, in school, or on a walk, I would incessantly ply the questions, "What is the ultimate value of your work, cui bono?" etc. I went to bed in the evening with a feeling of hopelessness and dissatisfaction—haggard with considerations and reconsiderations of my outlook, my talent, my character, my future. In bed, I tossed from side to side, mentally exhausted with my efforts to obtain some satisfying conclusion—always hopeful, determined to the last to be able to square up my little affairs before going to sleep. But out of this mazy, vertiginous mass of thinking no satisfaction ever came. Now, I thought—or the next moment—or as soon as I review and revise myself in this or in that aspect, I shall be content. And so I went on, tearing down and reforming, revising and reviewing, till finally from sheer exhaustion and very unhappy I fell asleep.
February 20.
Am feeling very unwell. My ill-health, my isolation, baulked ambitions, and daily breadwinning all conspire to bring me down. The idea of a pistol and the end of it grows on me day by day.
February 21.
After four days of the most profound depression of spirits, bitterness, self-distrust, despair, I emerged from the cloud to-day quite suddenly (probably the arsenic and strychnine begins to take effect) and walked up Exhibition Road with the intention of visiting the Science Museum Library so as to refer to Schafer's Essentials of Histology (I have to watch myself carefully so that I may act at once as soon as the balance of mind is restored). In the lobby was a woman screaming as if in pain, with a passer-by at her side saying sternly, "What is the matter with you?" as if she were making herself ridiculous by suffering pain in public.
I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest—after all—I should be done out of my Essentials of Histology. Even in the Library I very nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read.
March 4.
The Entomological Society