Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody Hell" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable book—a work of genius.
December 23.
To be cheerful this Xmas would require a coup de théâtre—some sort of psychological sleight of hand.
I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a soul to converse with. Everything comes to me second-hand—thro' the newspapers, the world of life thro' the halfpenny Daily News, and the world of books thro' the Times Literary Supplement. For the rest I listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look into the fire to see the pictures there....
December 24.
Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic the world is.
Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hill-top, I could look right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of ambassadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever expected to be again.
December 26.
"In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use terms that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery—"
(Why do I waste my energy with this damned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I am going out for a walk in the fog.)