Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to explore. I could just amble along—a spectator merely—and automatically register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the Dublin Review!
What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of studying and tasting life and character in North ——, at Borough Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns—not to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with—Zoology, if you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an indefinite smudge—odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)—all are gone—too remote to bear recital—yet just sufficiently clear to harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth is buried—a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a drowned sailor—disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the coast—with a pitiful myopia—I preferred Wiedersheim's Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's Paleontology with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling Pariasaurus and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!
London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand is permanently "pins and needles" and in the finger tips I have lost all sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?
A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London. Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver's shuttle and numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show. Everywhere always in the street people—millions of them —whom I do not know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as to-day I wake up and race about beside myself—a swollen bag ready to burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.
Apologia pro vita mea
How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all time?
Well, here are some precedents:—
Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland agonised at Leipsig.
Hegel wrote the last lines of the Phenomenology of Spirit within sound of the guns of Jena.
While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne, ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the song the Sirens sang.