July 26, 2025 • 22 mins
Dive into the captivating final journal entries of British naturalist Bruce Frederick Cummings. This poignant narrative stretches from March 1918 to June 1919, a tumultuous period that saw the end of WWI. It’s a book that follows the successful publication of Cummings previous journal, The Journal of a Disappointed Man. In this more concise volume, Cummings offers his contemplative reflections on the end of the war, tinged with the realization that while the world celebrated peace, he was grappling with failing health. His body may have been succumbing to multiple sclerosis, but his emotional and intellectual clarity remained until the end. This journal is not only a vibrant historical document but also a profoundly moving and poetic piece of personal literature. - Summary by Adam Whybray
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section two of a Last Dhari by W. N. P. Barbellian.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Rush Kolnikov and Sonya October fourth,
(00:26):
nineteen eighteen. This evening, E, being away in Wales for
a few days, sat with nurse who, with dramatic emphasis
and real understanding, read to me in the firelight, sent
Matthew's account of the Trial of Jesus. It reminded me,
of course, of Rushkolnikov and Sonya in crime and punishment
(00:47):
reading the Bible together. Though my incident was in a
minor key. Nurse told me of the wrangle between mister
P and Miss b over teaching the Sunday school children
all about Hell. October fifth, nineteen eighteen. Some London neurologist
is inject a serum into a woman's spine with beneficial results,
(01:09):
and as her disease is the same as mine, they
wish me to try it too. I may be able
to walk again, to write, et cetera, my life prolonged.
They little know what they ask of me. Whatever the
widow may have expressed. I doubt not. Jesus received scant
gratitude from the widow's son at nine for his resurrection,
(01:30):
and I have been dead these eighteen months. Death is sweet.
All my past life is ashes, and the prospect of
beginning anew leaves me stone cold. They can never understand,
I mean, my relatives, what a typhoon I have come through.
And just as I am crippling into port, I have
(01:51):
no mind to put to sea again. I am too
tired now to shoulder the burden of hope again. This chance,
had it been earlier, had been welcome. In this present mood,
life seems more of a menace than death ever did.
And the best it would be whinings and pinings and
(02:13):
terrible regrets. And how could I endure to be watching
her struggles? And if further misfortune came, how could I
meet her eyes? In short, you see, I funk it.
Yet I am sure the best thing for her would
be to wipe out this past, forget it, and start
(02:33):
fresh memory. Even of these sad years would lose its outlining.
Course of time, my pity merely enervates, and sympathy takes
on an almost cynical appearance, when help is needed. November two,
nineteen eighteen. The war news is fine. For weeks past
(02:58):
I've gained full possession of my soul and lived in
dignity and serenity of spirit as never before. It has
been a gradual process, but I am changed a better man, calm, peaceful,
and by Jove, top dog. May God forgive me all
my follies. My darling E, I know, is secretly traveling
(03:21):
along the same mournful road as I have traveled these
many years, and have now arrived at the end of
And I must lend her all the strength I can,
but it is hard to try to undo what I
have done to her. Time is our ally, but it
moves so slowly. November three, November twenty sixth, nineteen eighteen.
(03:46):
Posterity will know more about these times than we do.
Men are now too preoccupied to digest the volume of
history in each day's newspaper. On the eleventh, my newspaper
never came at all, and I endured purgative, heard the
guns and bells, and felt rather weepy. In the afternoon,
(04:06):
nurse willed me as far as the French Horn, where
I borrowed a paper and sat out in the rain.
Reading it, some speculators have talked wildly about the prospect
of modern civilization in default of a league of nations
becoming extinct. Modern civilization can never be extinguished by anything
less than a secular cataclysm or a new Ice age.
(04:29):
You cannot analogize the Minoan civilization, which is clearly vanished.
The world now is bigger than crete, and its history,
henceforward will be a continuous development, with any such lacuna
as that between ancient Greece and I. Elizabethan's civilization in
its present form is ours to hold and to keep
(04:50):
in perpetuity, for better for worse. There can be no
monstrous deflection in its evolution at this late period, any
more than we can hope to cultivate the pineal eye
on top of our heads, useful as it would be
in those days of aeroplanes. But the chance is gone.
Evolution has swept past. Perhaps on some other planet mortality
(05:14):
may have had more luck. There are peradventure happy creatures
somewhere in this great universe who generate their own light
like glow worms, or can see in the dark like owls,
or who have wings like birds. Or there may be
no mortality, only immortality, no stomachs, no flu, no pillms,
(05:37):
and no kisses, which would be a pity. But it
is no good. We earth dwell as repining now it
is too late. Such things can never be, not in
our time anyhow, So far as I personally am concerned,
I am just now very glad man is only bipedal.
(05:57):
To be a centipede and have to lie would be
more than even I could bear. If the civilizations of
ancient Greece or ancient Rome had permeated the whole world,
they would never have become extinct. We are now entered
on the kingless republican era. The next struggle, in some
(06:19):
ways more bitter and more bettracted than this, will be
between capital and labour. After that, the Millennianism of mister Wells,
and the spiritualistic age after the aeroplane the soul. Few
yet realize what a transformation awaits the patient investigations of
(06:40):
the psychical researchers. We know next to nothing about the mind,
force and spirit workings of man. But there will be
a tussle with hoary old materialists like Edward clod The
old Lady shows her coins six nineteen eighteen. My old
(07:03):
nurse lapses into bizarre malapropisms. She's afraid the Society for
the Propagation of Cruelty to Animals will find fault with
the way we house our hands for boiling potatoes. She
prefers to use the camusol casserole. She says, mister bowlflower
(07:25):
arm instance von trip haz and so on. Yesterday, in
the long serenity of a dark winter's night, with a
view to arouse my interest in life, she went and
brought some hairloom treasures from the bottom of her massive trunk,
some coins of George's first. Of course, they're all obsolete now,
(07:48):
she says, what entirely obsolute? I inquired in surprise The
answer was in the informative. In spite of physical difficulties
surrounding me in a mesh work, I have now unaided
corrected my proofs in joyful triumph, an ecstatic conqueror up
(08:09):
to the very end, I take my life in homeopathic doses.
Now I am tethered by but a single slender thread
curiosity to know what mister Wells says in the preface,
A little piece of vanity that deserves to be flouted.
November twenty ninth, nineteen eighteen. Oh, all ye people, the
(08:35):
crowning irony of my life. Where is the sacred oil?
Is my now cast iron religious conviction shortly summarized as
love and unselfishness. These my moral code, have captured the
approval not only of my ethical but my intellectual side
(08:56):
as well. Undoubtedly and dogmatically, if you like, a man
should be unselfish for the good of the soul and
also to the credit of his intellect. To be selfish
is to imprison in a tiny cage the glorious ego,
capable of penetrating to the farthest confines of the universe.
(09:16):
As for love, it is an instinct and the earnest,
like all beauty, physical as well as moral, of our
future union into one one loving heart sets another on fire.
Sent Augustine Confessions, December first, nineteen eighteen. What I have
(09:41):
always feared is coming to pass. Love for my little
daughter only another communications string with life to be cut.
I want to hear the tune of little feet along
the floor. I am filled with intolerable sadness at the
thought of her. Oh, Oh, forgive me, forgive me. The
(10:06):
pugg List, December third, nineteen eighteen. My word, you do
look a figure, the old nurse exclaimed to me today,
in the course of one of the periodical tetanuses of
all my muscles. When the whole body is contorted into
a rigid tangle, I shall never make a pugg list.
(10:28):
Had the word as her own, I said. I was
rather impressed, though, for she is one of those who,
like mister Saddletree, I believe, in the heart of Middlothian,
never notice anything. She would not notice if she came
into my room and I was standing on my head
as stiff as a ferrule. You may observe, I should say,
(10:50):
I am standing upside down? Would you turn me round?
With pleasure? Is her invariable reply to every request I
prof victory at Christmas December twenty third, nineteen eighteen. It
is strange to hear all this thunderous tread of victory,
(11:13):
peace and Christmas rejoinings above ground, all muffled by the earth,
yet quite audible. They have not buried me deep enough.
Here in this vault, all is unchanged. It is bad
for me, for as today a faint tremour passes along
my palsied limbs, a tremour of lust, lust of life,
(11:37):
a desire to be up and mingling in the crowd,
to be soaked up by it, to feel a sense
of all mankind flooding the heart, and strong masculine youth
pulsing at the wrists. I can think of nothing more
ennobling than the sense of power unity in manhood that
comes to one in a sea of humanity, all animated
(11:59):
by the same motive to be sweeping folk off their feet,
and to be swept off oneself, that is, to be man,
not merely mister Brown Death, Christmas Day, nineteen eighteen. Surely
I muse a man cannot be accounted a failure who
(12:19):
succeeds at last in calling in all his idle desires
and wandering motives, and with utter restfulness, concentrating his life
on the benison of death. I am happy to think that,
like a pilot hard a port, death is ready at
a signal to conduct me over this moaning bar to
(12:40):
still deep waters. After four years of war, life has
grown cheap and ugly, and death how desirable and sweet.
Youth now is in love with death, and many are
heavy hearted because death flouts their affection. The main and
holt and blind how terrible if life had no end,
(13:07):
With how splendid a zest the young men flung themselves
on death like passionate lovers, a magnificent slaughter, for indifference
to life is the noblest form of unselfishness, and unselfishness
is the highest virtue. Victorosku die celante ud vivert durrant
(13:31):
felix essi moray lucan was Sir Thomas Browne's rendering. Were
all deluded, vainly searching ways to make us happy by
the length of days, for cunningly to make attract this
breath the gods conceal the happiness of death. This mood,
(13:58):
not permanent, but recurring constantly, equals the happiness and comfort
of the drowning man when he sinks for the third time.
A profound compassion for my dear ones and friends and
all humanity left on the shore of this world struggling
films my heart. I want to say, genially and persuasively
(14:19):
to them as my last testament, why not die? What
loneliness under the stars. It is only bland, unreflecting eupepsia
that leads poets to dithreems about the heavenly bodies, and
to call them all by beautiful names Diana. Yet the
(14:46):
moon is a menace and a terrible object, lesson despite
blanco white that will well with the night and never
revealed the stars to us. Suppose a man with the
swiftness of love ight touring through the darkness and cold
of this great universe. He would pass through innumerable solar
(15:06):
systems and discover plenty of pellets Like this Earth. He's
surging with waves of struggling life, like worms in carrion.
And he would tour onward like this forever and ever.
There'd be no end to it, and always he would
(15:28):
be discovering more hot suns, more cold and blasted moons,
and more pellets. And each pellet would be an internal,
fatuous dance of revolutions, the life on it blind and
ignorant of all other life outside its own Atmospherebow of
(15:48):
this could de sac There is one glorious escape, death,
a way out of time and space. As long as
we go on living, we are as stupid and as
caged as these dancing rats with diseased semi circular canals
that incessantly run round and round in circles. But if
(16:11):
we be induced to remain in this cold sack. There
is always an alleviate in communication and communion with our fellows.
Men need each other badly. In this world. The stars
are crushing, but mankind in the mass is even above
the stars. How far above death may show, perhaps to
(16:34):
our surprise. But if I go on, I shall come
round to the conviction that life is beer and skittles cheerio.
This is not written in despair. Despair is a weakening
of faith hope in God. But I am tired and
(16:57):
in need of relief. Death tantalizes my curiosity, and sometimes
I feel I could kill myself just to satisfy it.
But I agree that death, save as the only solution,
is merely a funk hole. Boxing Day, nineteen eighteen. James
(17:22):
Joyce is my man in the Portrait of the Artist
as a young man. Here is a writer who tells
the truth about himself. It is almost impossible to tell
the truth in this journal. I have tried, but I
have not succeeded. I have set down a good deal,
(17:43):
but I cannot tell it. Truth of self has to
be left by the psychology miner at the bottom of
his boring. Perhaps fifty or one hundred years. Hence posterity
may be told, but contemporary will never see how soldiers, deliberately,
(18:03):
from mistaken sense of charity or decency, conceal the horrors
of this war. Publishers and government aid and abet them.
Yet a good cinema film of all the worst and
most filthy and disgusting side of the war. Everyone squeamish
and dainty minded to attend under state compulsion, to have
(18:24):
their necks scroffed, their sensitive nose tips pitched into it,
and their rest on lawny counches disturbed for a month after,
but do as much to revent future wars as any
league of nations. It is easy to reconcile on self
demand sorrows by shutting the eyes to them, but there
(18:46):
is no satisfaction in so easy a victory. How many
people have been jerry building their faith and creed all
their lives by this method. One breath of truth and
honest self dealing would below the structure down like a
house of cards. The optimist and believer must bear in
mind such things as the ccs described by mister Duhamel,
(19:10):
or this from m. Latsko's men in battle um Hm
the captain raised himself a little and saw the ground
and a broad, dark shadow that Vexler cast blood. He
was bleeding? Or what? Surely that was blood? It couldn't
(19:33):
be anything but blood, And yet it stretched out so
peculiarly and drew itself up like a thin thread to
Vexler up to where his hand pressed his body, as
though he wanted to pull up the roots that bound
him to the earth. The captain had to see. He
poured his head farther out from under the mound and
(19:54):
uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite horror. The
wretched man was draggeduging his entrails behind him. The reviewer
suggests that the book should be read by school children
in every school in the world. I should like to
take it, and I'd hope it is large and heavy,
(20:15):
and bring it down on the heads of the heartless,
unimaginable mob, who would then have to look at it,
if only to see what it was that cracked down
on their skulls so heavily. Certainly, Joyce has chosen the
easier method of transferring his truth of self to a
fictional character, thus avoiding recognition. I have failed in the
(20:37):
method urged by Tolstoy in the Diary of his youth.
Would it not be better to say, he asks, this
is the kind of man I am. If you do
not like me, I am sorry, but God made me so.
Let every man show just what he is, and then
what has been weak and laughable in him will become
(20:58):
so no longer. Tolstoy himself did not live up to this.
He confessed to his diary, but he kept his diary
to himself. Some of my weaknesses I publish, and no doubt,
you say at once self advertisement. I agree more or less,
but believe egotism is a diagnosis nearer the mark. I
(21:21):
do not aspire to Tolstoy's ethical motives. Mine are intellectual.
I am the scientific investigator of myself, and if the
published researches bring me into notice, I am not a
verse from it. Though interest in my work comes first.
Did not Sir Thomas Brown say, ever, so long ago
(21:45):
we carry within us the wonders we seek without us.
There is all Africa and her prodigies in us. End
of Section two of a Last Diary
Section two of a Last Dhari by W. N. P. Barbellian.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Rush Kolnikov and Sonya October fourth,
(00:26):
nineteen eighteen. This evening, E, being away in Wales for
a few days, sat with nurse who, with dramatic emphasis
and real understanding, read to me in the firelight, sent
Matthew's account of the Trial of Jesus. It reminded me,
of course, of Rushkolnikov and Sonya in crime and punishment
(00:47):
reading the Bible together. Though my incident was in a
minor key. Nurse told me of the wrangle between mister
P and Miss b over teaching the Sunday school children
all about Hell. October fifth, nineteen eighteen. Some London neurologist
is inject a serum into a woman's spine with beneficial results,
(01:09):
and as her disease is the same as mine, they
wish me to try it too. I may be able
to walk again, to write, et cetera, my life prolonged.
They little know what they ask of me. Whatever the
widow may have expressed. I doubt not. Jesus received scant
gratitude from the widow's son at nine for his resurrection,
(01:30):
and I have been dead these eighteen months. Death is sweet.
All my past life is ashes, and the prospect of
beginning anew leaves me stone cold. They can never understand,
I mean, my relatives, what a typhoon I have come through.
And just as I am crippling into port, I have
(01:51):
no mind to put to sea again. I am too
tired now to shoulder the burden of hope again. This chance,
had it been earlier, had been welcome. In this present mood,
life seems more of a menace than death ever did.
And the best it would be whinings and pinings and
(02:13):
terrible regrets. And how could I endure to be watching
her struggles? And if further misfortune came, how could I
meet her eyes? In short, you see, I funk it.
Yet I am sure the best thing for her would
be to wipe out this past, forget it, and start
(02:33):
fresh memory. Even of these sad years would lose its outlining.
Course of time, my pity merely enervates, and sympathy takes
on an almost cynical appearance, when help is needed. November two,
nineteen eighteen. The war news is fine. For weeks past
(02:58):
I've gained full possession of my soul and lived in
dignity and serenity of spirit as never before. It has
been a gradual process, but I am changed a better man, calm, peaceful,
and by Jove, top dog. May God forgive me all
my follies. My darling E, I know, is secretly traveling
(03:21):
along the same mournful road as I have traveled these
many years, and have now arrived at the end of
And I must lend her all the strength I can,
but it is hard to try to undo what I
have done to her. Time is our ally, but it
moves so slowly. November three, November twenty sixth, nineteen eighteen.
(03:46):
Posterity will know more about these times than we do.
Men are now too preoccupied to digest the volume of
history in each day's newspaper. On the eleventh, my newspaper
never came at all, and I endured purgative, heard the
guns and bells, and felt rather weepy. In the afternoon,
(04:06):
nurse willed me as far as the French Horn, where
I borrowed a paper and sat out in the rain.
Reading it, some speculators have talked wildly about the prospect
of modern civilization in default of a league of nations
becoming extinct. Modern civilization can never be extinguished by anything
less than a secular cataclysm or a new Ice age.
(04:29):
You cannot analogize the Minoan civilization, which is clearly vanished.
The world now is bigger than crete, and its history,
henceforward will be a continuous development, with any such lacuna
as that between ancient Greece and I. Elizabethan's civilization in
its present form is ours to hold and to keep
(04:50):
in perpetuity, for better for worse. There can be no
monstrous deflection in its evolution at this late period, any
more than we can hope to cultivate the pineal eye
on top of our heads, useful as it would be
in those days of aeroplanes. But the chance is gone.
Evolution has swept past. Perhaps on some other planet mortality
(05:14):
may have had more luck. There are peradventure happy creatures
somewhere in this great universe who generate their own light
like glow worms, or can see in the dark like owls,
or who have wings like birds. Or there may be
no mortality, only immortality, no stomachs, no flu, no pillms,
(05:37):
and no kisses, which would be a pity. But it
is no good. We earth dwell as repining now it
is too late. Such things can never be, not in
our time anyhow, So far as I personally am concerned,
I am just now very glad man is only bipedal.
(05:57):
To be a centipede and have to lie would be
more than even I could bear. If the civilizations of
ancient Greece or ancient Rome had permeated the whole world,
they would never have become extinct. We are now entered
on the kingless republican era. The next struggle, in some
(06:19):
ways more bitter and more bettracted than this, will be
between capital and labour. After that, the Millennianism of mister Wells,
and the spiritualistic age after the aeroplane the soul. Few
yet realize what a transformation awaits the patient investigations of
(06:40):
the psychical researchers. We know next to nothing about the mind,
force and spirit workings of man. But there will be
a tussle with hoary old materialists like Edward clod The
old Lady shows her coins six nineteen eighteen. My old
(07:03):
nurse lapses into bizarre malapropisms. She's afraid the Society for
the Propagation of Cruelty to Animals will find fault with
the way we house our hands for boiling potatoes. She
prefers to use the camusol casserole. She says, mister bowlflower
(07:25):
arm instance von trip haz and so on. Yesterday, in
the long serenity of a dark winter's night, with a
view to arouse my interest in life, she went and
brought some hairloom treasures from the bottom of her massive trunk,
some coins of George's first. Of course, they're all obsolete now,
(07:48):
she says, what entirely obsolute? I inquired in surprise The
answer was in the informative. In spite of physical difficulties
surrounding me in a mesh work, I have now unaided
corrected my proofs in joyful triumph, an ecstatic conqueror up
(08:09):
to the very end, I take my life in homeopathic doses.
Now I am tethered by but a single slender thread
curiosity to know what mister Wells says in the preface,
A little piece of vanity that deserves to be flouted.
November twenty ninth, nineteen eighteen. Oh, all ye people, the
(08:35):
crowning irony of my life. Where is the sacred oil?
Is my now cast iron religious conviction shortly summarized as
love and unselfishness. These my moral code, have captured the
approval not only of my ethical but my intellectual side
(08:56):
as well. Undoubtedly and dogmatically, if you like, a man
should be unselfish for the good of the soul and
also to the credit of his intellect. To be selfish
is to imprison in a tiny cage the glorious ego,
capable of penetrating to the farthest confines of the universe.
(09:16):
As for love, it is an instinct and the earnest,
like all beauty, physical as well as moral, of our
future union into one one loving heart sets another on fire.
Sent Augustine Confessions, December first, nineteen eighteen. What I have
(09:41):
always feared is coming to pass. Love for my little
daughter only another communications string with life to be cut.
I want to hear the tune of little feet along
the floor. I am filled with intolerable sadness at the
thought of her. Oh, Oh, forgive me, forgive me. The
(10:06):
pugg List, December third, nineteen eighteen. My word, you do
look a figure, the old nurse exclaimed to me today,
in the course of one of the periodical tetanuses of
all my muscles. When the whole body is contorted into
a rigid tangle, I shall never make a pugg list.
(10:28):
Had the word as her own, I said. I was
rather impressed, though, for she is one of those who,
like mister Saddletree, I believe, in the heart of Middlothian,
never notice anything. She would not notice if she came
into my room and I was standing on my head
as stiff as a ferrule. You may observe, I should say,
(10:50):
I am standing upside down? Would you turn me round?
With pleasure? Is her invariable reply to every request I
prof victory at Christmas December twenty third, nineteen eighteen. It
is strange to hear all this thunderous tread of victory,
(11:13):
peace and Christmas rejoinings above ground, all muffled by the earth,
yet quite audible. They have not buried me deep enough.
Here in this vault, all is unchanged. It is bad
for me, for as today a faint tremour passes along
my palsied limbs, a tremour of lust, lust of life,
(11:37):
a desire to be up and mingling in the crowd,
to be soaked up by it, to feel a sense
of all mankind flooding the heart, and strong masculine youth
pulsing at the wrists. I can think of nothing more
ennobling than the sense of power unity in manhood that
comes to one in a sea of humanity, all animated
(11:59):
by the same motive to be sweeping folk off their feet,
and to be swept off oneself, that is, to be man,
not merely mister Brown Death, Christmas Day, nineteen eighteen. Surely
I muse a man cannot be accounted a failure who
(12:19):
succeeds at last in calling in all his idle desires
and wandering motives, and with utter restfulness, concentrating his life
on the benison of death. I am happy to think that,
like a pilot hard a port, death is ready at
a signal to conduct me over this moaning bar to
(12:40):
still deep waters. After four years of war, life has
grown cheap and ugly, and death how desirable and sweet.
Youth now is in love with death, and many are
heavy hearted because death flouts their affection. The main and
holt and blind how terrible if life had no end,
(13:07):
With how splendid a zest the young men flung themselves
on death like passionate lovers, a magnificent slaughter, for indifference
to life is the noblest form of unselfishness, and unselfishness
is the highest virtue. Victorosku die celante ud vivert durrant
(13:31):
felix essi moray lucan was Sir Thomas Browne's rendering. Were
all deluded, vainly searching ways to make us happy by
the length of days, for cunningly to make attract this
breath the gods conceal the happiness of death. This mood,
(13:58):
not permanent, but recurring constantly, equals the happiness and comfort
of the drowning man when he sinks for the third time.
A profound compassion for my dear ones and friends and
all humanity left on the shore of this world struggling
films my heart. I want to say, genially and persuasively
(14:19):
to them as my last testament, why not die? What
loneliness under the stars. It is only bland, unreflecting eupepsia
that leads poets to dithreems about the heavenly bodies, and
to call them all by beautiful names Diana. Yet the
(14:46):
moon is a menace and a terrible object, lesson despite
blanco white that will well with the night and never
revealed the stars to us. Suppose a man with the
swiftness of love ight touring through the darkness and cold
of this great universe. He would pass through innumerable solar
(15:06):
systems and discover plenty of pellets Like this Earth. He's
surging with waves of struggling life, like worms in carrion.
And he would tour onward like this forever and ever.
There'd be no end to it, and always he would
(15:28):
be discovering more hot suns, more cold and blasted moons,
and more pellets. And each pellet would be an internal,
fatuous dance of revolutions, the life on it blind and
ignorant of all other life outside its own Atmospherebow of
(15:48):
this could de sac There is one glorious escape, death,
a way out of time and space. As long as
we go on living, we are as stupid and as
caged as these dancing rats with diseased semi circular canals
that incessantly run round and round in circles. But if
(16:11):
we be induced to remain in this cold sack. There
is always an alleviate in communication and communion with our fellows.
Men need each other badly. In this world. The stars
are crushing, but mankind in the mass is even above
the stars. How far above death may show, perhaps to
(16:34):
our surprise. But if I go on, I shall come
round to the conviction that life is beer and skittles cheerio.
This is not written in despair. Despair is a weakening
of faith hope in God. But I am tired and
(16:57):
in need of relief. Death tantalizes my curiosity, and sometimes
I feel I could kill myself just to satisfy it.
But I agree that death, save as the only solution,
is merely a funk hole. Boxing Day, nineteen eighteen. James
(17:22):
Joyce is my man in the Portrait of the Artist
as a young man. Here is a writer who tells
the truth about himself. It is almost impossible to tell
the truth in this journal. I have tried, but I
have not succeeded. I have set down a good deal,
(17:43):
but I cannot tell it. Truth of self has to
be left by the psychology miner at the bottom of
his boring. Perhaps fifty or one hundred years. Hence posterity
may be told, but contemporary will never see how soldiers, deliberately,
(18:03):
from mistaken sense of charity or decency, conceal the horrors
of this war. Publishers and government aid and abet them.
Yet a good cinema film of all the worst and
most filthy and disgusting side of the war. Everyone squeamish
and dainty minded to attend under state compulsion, to have
(18:24):
their necks scroffed, their sensitive nose tips pitched into it,
and their rest on lawny counches disturbed for a month after,
but do as much to revent future wars as any
league of nations. It is easy to reconcile on self
demand sorrows by shutting the eyes to them, but there
(18:46):
is no satisfaction in so easy a victory. How many
people have been jerry building their faith and creed all
their lives by this method. One breath of truth and
honest self dealing would below the structure down like a
house of cards. The optimist and believer must bear in
mind such things as the ccs described by mister Duhamel,
(19:10):
or this from m. Latsko's men in battle um Hm
the captain raised himself a little and saw the ground
and a broad, dark shadow that Vexler cast blood. He
was bleeding? Or what? Surely that was blood? It couldn't
(19:33):
be anything but blood, And yet it stretched out so
peculiarly and drew itself up like a thin thread to
Vexler up to where his hand pressed his body, as
though he wanted to pull up the roots that bound
him to the earth. The captain had to see. He
poured his head farther out from under the mound and
(19:54):
uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite horror. The
wretched man was draggeduging his entrails behind him. The reviewer
suggests that the book should be read by school children
in every school in the world. I should like to
take it, and I'd hope it is large and heavy,
(20:15):
and bring it down on the heads of the heartless,
unimaginable mob, who would then have to look at it,
if only to see what it was that cracked down
on their skulls so heavily. Certainly, Joyce has chosen the
easier method of transferring his truth of self to a
fictional character, thus avoiding recognition. I have failed in the
(20:37):
method urged by Tolstoy in the Diary of his youth.
Would it not be better to say, he asks, this
is the kind of man I am. If you do
not like me, I am sorry, but God made me so.
Let every man show just what he is, and then
what has been weak and laughable in him will become
(20:58):
so no longer. Tolstoy himself did not live up to this.
He confessed to his diary, but he kept his diary
to himself. Some of my weaknesses I publish, and no doubt,
you say at once self advertisement. I agree more or less,
but believe egotism is a diagnosis nearer the mark. I
(21:21):
do not aspire to Tolstoy's ethical motives. Mine are intellectual.
I am the scientific investigator of myself, and if the
published researches bring me into notice, I am not a
verse from it. Though interest in my work comes first.
Did not Sir Thomas Brown say, ever, so long ago
(21:45):
we carry within us the wonders we seek without us.
There is all Africa and her prodigies in us. End
of Section two of a Last Diary
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