A Writer's Notebook (21 page)

The vague low song of London, like the distant hum of a mighty engine.

As one grows older one becomes more silent. In one's youth one is ready to pour oneself out to the world; one feels an intense
fellowship with other people, one wants to throw oneself in their arms and one feels that they will receive one; one wants to open oneself to them so that they may take one, one wants to penetrate into them; one's life seems to overflow into the lives of others and become one with theirs as the waters of rivers become one in the sea. But gradually the power one felt of doing all this leaves one; a barrier rises up between oneself and one's fellows, and one realises that they are strangers to one. Then perhaps one places all one's love, all one's faculty of expansion on one person, making, as it were, a final effort to join one's soul to his; with all one's might one draws him to one trying to know him and be known by him right down to the bottom of one's heart. But little by little one finds that it is all impossible, and however ardently one loves him, however intimately one is connected with him, he is always a stranger to one. Not even the most devoted husband and wife know one another. Then one retires into oneself and in one's silence builds a world of one's own which one keeps from the eyes of every living soul, even from the person one loves best, knowing he would not understand it.

Sometimes one feels rage and despair that one should know so little the people one loves. One is heart-broken at the impossibility of understanding them, of getting right down into their heart of hearts. Sometimes, accidentally or under the influence of some emotion, one gets a glimpse of those inner selves of theirs, and one despairs on seeing how ignorant one is of that inner self and how far away from one it is.

When two people have been talking of some subject and a silence suddenly rises between them, the thoughts of each travel in their own direction, and in a little while, on speaking again, they will find how intensely they have diverged.

They say that life is short; to those who look back it may seem short enough; but to those who look forward, it is horribly long, endless. Sometimes one feels one cannot endure it. Why cannot one fall asleep and never, never again wake? How happy must be the lives of those who can look forward to eternity! The thought of living for ever is horrible.

There are so many people in the world that the action of an individual can be of no importance.

How sententious you are! One feels your observations should be punctuated with pinches of snuff.

It is terrible to have no means of expressing oneself, always to have to keep one's feelings a secret.

Am I a minor poet that I should expose my bleeding vitals to the vulgar crowd?

If it were possible decently to dissolve marriage during the first year not one in fifty couples would remain united.

Readers do not know that the passage which they read in half an hour, in five minutes, has been evolved out of the heart's blood of the author. The emotion which strikes them as “so true” he has lived through with nights of bitter tears.

Human sorrow is as great as human heart.