January 1.
The New Year came in like a thief in the night—noiselessly; no bells, no syrens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this—seeing what the year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.
January 20.
I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body, even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a man came and set up a post in the garden for the clothes' line. As soon as I saw the post I said "gibbet"—it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the malefactor. Last night while E—— was nursing the baby I most delightfully remarked: "What a little parasite—why you are Cleopatra affixing the aspic—'Tarry, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.'"
The fact that such images arise spontaneously in my mind, show how rotten to the core I am.
... The advent of the Baby was my coup de grâce. The little creature seems to focus under one head all my personal disasters and more than once a senseless rage has clutched me at the thought of a baby in exchange for my ambition, a nursery for the study. Yet, on the whole, I find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new, intact on the threshold: I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a suit of dirty clothes. My life and person are patched and greasy; hers is new and without a single blemish or misfortune.... Moreover, she makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.
January 21.
Death
What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past—if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the orchards and farm-yards in —— birdsnesting, walking along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over Parker and Haswell and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times—the first time I found a Bottle Tit's nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating into the fastnesses of my El Dorado—Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley's Principles of Human Understanding (what a soul-shaking epoch that was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.
January 26.