At night I sleep, but at intervals during day and evening, and in the morning I find it a great effort not to fly off the handle in protest of it all, but keep on just the same.
I have had several passionate weak outbursts during the month, several times I have made a fool of myself by venting my temper on those around me, but generally I hold myself in better and am more conscious of having command of myself.
As for my ideas and ambition. It is still alive. The will to live is stronger than any misery as a force for life as against death. Taking this as a mere basis, I must of necessity have some larger view than the mere cramping effect of a clerkship.
I work, because I must and under protest, but I try to do my best, and I work honestly and I earn my salary and more, as much as I can under the circumstances.
I am just getting settled and am getting my books together. I am now going in for drama and I still have a soft spot in my heart for philosophy, although I am still at the beginning of Kant’s Critique. I read a little of it to-day.
I still feel the call of a larger mission, but I feel more like going about it in a practical, business-like way, because I realize I must. I acknowledge that. Experience has had to push facts down my throat before I would face them with the aid of Bernard Shaw.
I feel more sincere now. A tendency I have noted to theatricalism I will sternly suppress. I sometimes act cruelly after a mental struggle and I just hold myself by calling on Neitzsche and the philosophy of the superman, and then woe betide the one who crosses me.
While I will not force it, and avoid self-pity, I cannot help feeling at bottom the tragedy of life to me. It is such an effort to live, there is so little to look back on, no youth, no sweetheart, no love except that of the children, and the mistaken love of a weak mother. The short peace to-night stands out but as soon as I became conscious of it I said to myself that I must cultivate that frame of mind to do the best work and find out the truth quickest.
—, Sunday, June 1, 1913.
This morning, the beginning of week and month, and the first real spring Sunday of the season, I once more start on a process of rehabilitation. For three years I have been fighting my sexual passions. Previous to May 21, 1910, as I note from that date in my diary, I was clean absolutely, as I have said before. Three years of the fiercest action and reaction. Despair to the verge of suicide, exultation to such heights of ecstasy that Heaven opened its gates almost. And in between indifference, or simply dull care, daily monotonous, hopeless toil, restless, tired nights.