Cynicism
For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting, credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can't believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And strange to say it is the "good" people above all who most bitterly disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he arouses no expectations, and so I get no heart-burning. It is the good, the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood's beliefs.... I am a cynic then, but not a reckless cynic—a careworn unhappy cynic without the cynic's pride. "It is easy to be cynical," someone admonished me. "Unfortunately it is," I said.
We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the Englishman's reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others. And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting me to the quick. "To the pure all things are pure," whence I should conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people's motes.
March 12.
Archæopteryx and Mudflats
Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save them up. They were more than that—they were pangs, and pangs that twanged.
(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)
One was when I saw the well-known figure of the Archæopteryx remains in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an illustrated encyclopædia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and I thought of the wide estuary of the T——, its stretches of mudflats and its wild-fowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:
"What's that?"
"Archæopteryx," said I.