The Journal of a Disappointed Man

The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible. Consequently plenty of waste and fever and--as I might have discovered earlier for myself--success almost out of the question. If only I were pure-bred science or pure-bred art! March 4. Life is a dream and we are all somnambuloes. We know that for a fact at all times when we are most intensely alive--at crises of unprecedented change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought swiftly to a close like a vision! I sit here writing this--a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I? "A soap-bubble hanging from a reed." Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire--and a taste for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator--critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!--my own stupid Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole--like old Samuel again--I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways.