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349
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
·
W. N. P. Barbellion
295
December
15.
"To
stand
upon
one's
guard
against
Death
exasperates
her
malice
and
protracts
our
sufferings."
W.S.
Landor.
December
19.
The
Parson
called,
over
the
christening
of
the
baby.
I
told
him
I
was
an
agnostic.
"There
are
several
interesting
lines
of
thought
down
here,"
he
said
wearily,
passing
his
hand
over
his
eyes.
I
know
several
men
more
enthusiastic
over
Fleas
and
Worms
than
this
phlegmatic
priest,
over
Jesus
Christ.
December
20.
The
reason
why
I
do
not
spend
my
days
in
despair
and
my
nights
in
hopeless
weeping
simply
is
that
I
am
in
love
with
my
own
ruin.
I
therefore
deserve
no
sympathy,
and
probably
shan't
get
it:
my
own
profound
self-compassion
is
enough.
I
am
so
abominably
self-conscious
that
no
smallest
detail
in
this
tragedy
eludes
me.
Day
after
day
I
sit
in
the
theatre
of
my
own
life
and
watch
the
drama
of
my
own
history
proceeding
to
its
close.
Pray
God
the
curtain
falls
at
the
right
moment
lest
the
play
drag
on
into
some
long
and
tedious
anticlimax.
We
all
like
to
dramatise
ourselves.
Byron
was
dramatising
himself
when,
in
a
fit
of
rhetorical
self-compassion,
he
wrote:
"Oh!
could
I
feel
as
I
have
felt
or
be
what
I
have
been,
Or
weep
as
I
could
once
have
wept
o'er
many
a
vanished
scene."
Shelley,
too,
being
an
artist
could
not
stand
insensible
to
his
own
tragedy
and
Francis
Thompson
suggests
that
he
even
anticipated
his
own
end
from
a
passage
in
Julian
and
Maddalo,
"...
if
you
can't
swim,
Beware
of
Providence."
"Did
no
earthly
dixisti,"
Thompson
asks,
"sound
in
his
ears
as
he
wrote
it?"
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