The Journal of a Disappointed Man

If however my cork does come out, there is an explosion, and placid people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks. Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at my double-facedness, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life--to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming--then this Journal would be quite unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain--the pain one might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition. It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability before, say bores or clods is sheer personal cowardice.... It is partly real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant, lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable, why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self upon my flabby amiable half.