My salary was increased at the first of the year to $22.50 a week. Although glad of this, my old-time pleasure at the receipt of more money each pay-day is lacking. Money I must have to live, further than that it seems a pitiful waste of time to spend one’s life in a mad endeavor to obtain wealth at the price of all that counts.
Havana, Cuba, February 29, 1912.
Leap-year and a good opportunity to enter on a bigger fight. I must date my beginning this time as February 18, being the day after my last fall from grace. The week and a half since, however, makes me feel confident once more, despite that for three or four days I have been without a night’s rest, owing to stomach trouble and the nervousness thereby engendered, but this is nothing unusual, that is, the loss of sleep, for it is long since I have had a real good night’s rest, and I know a crisis is approaching and I must get rested ere I collapse.
I have read during this time “Ibsen, the Man, His Art and His Significance,” by Haldane Macfall, and it has given me great encouragement and aroused intense enthusiasm. I feel that I am getting back my old enthusiasm, that I am recovering my ideals on a higher basis, although I am undoubtedly weaker than ever physically. But with increased moral strength I hope soon to cut down the buts, howevers, althoughs, and to stand forth with more decision, more firmness, and knowing myself, and with my ideas and ideals clarified.
During the last two months the first step in this attempted regeneration has been becoming more and more a determination, emerging from a mere unsettled idea—must return home for various reasons. First, I am played out physically and need rest. More important should be the fact that my mother is getting old, has been constantly calling to me to return, worries about me, needs me to put my shoulder to the wheel more than I have done. True, I have systematically put apart for my mother a certain amount every month for a long time and have sent it without fail even when only earning $10 a week back in the early part of 1910. This at least has kept me in constant touch with my dear old home, full of strife though it was.
While I have at frequently recurring periods thought of returning home during the past year and a half, my resolution did not crystallize until I began to feel the compelling necessity of a rest, bodily, mentally, and, I might say, morally. Hot and cold by turns, lonely, sleepless, tired and generally run down, I have not been able to look at things in their true proportion, and I must get away for awhile from the daily struggle, keeping up the mental and moral one, however. To this end I have practically cut out all amusement. Night after night I come home tired out, read a little, generally till lights are out at 10:30, and then to my disturbed sleep. Getting up early as to-day (7:00 to 7:30 being early for me) I either read, study, write as to-day, or work on my story which I started last August and of which I will write more later. This elimination of outside distractions is helping to strengthen me, helping me to look forward to a life of service without the necessity of foolish excitement, and the money I am saving by this closeness in everything except necessities I hope to enable me to go home, rest, think, exercise, and study calmly and sanely for a year, paying my mother a regular weekly amount; and I hope at the end of the year to have sufficiently found myself to go ahead on my work with more collected ideas as to what I want and what I should want, and all to the better interests of my mother, myself and the good of others with whom I may come in contact. By the middle of this year I hope to take the first step by returning home.
Havana, Sunday, March 17, 1912.
The 15th ushered in a new start, and the 16th was a very important day. On the 14th I had been thinking very intently about future plans and went very carefully over the ground of a possible college course. I picked up my Self Educators and looked into the various subjects for study, estimated the time I would have to spend on a college course; the financial difficulties, my mother’s need of my help, my temperament and pronounced predilection for certain things and as pronounced aversion for others, my nervousness and constant mental struggle; the result of all this was to confirm what I wrote on January 8, that I had about given up the idea. The only hope, or rather possibility I have in view now, is that I may take a course in certain special subjects—literature, drama, philosophy, logic and sociology, but I hate mathematics. I pick up a book of algebra with extreme distaste and, although my enthusiasm in New York caused me to study this subject fairly assiduously, I see it was a mistake.
I have a distinct tendency and deep enthusiasm for literature, gradually awakening from my first boyish effusions at the age of 10, and it was a waste of time to neglect what I can excel in for the sake of a mistaken idea that a college education means so much.