The Journal of a Disappointed Man

May 22. Generosity may be only weakness, philanthropy (beautiful word), self-advertisement, and praise of others sheer egotism. One can almost hear a eulogist winding himself up to strike his eulogy that comes out sententious, pompous, and full of self. May 23. The following is a description of Lermontov by Maurice Baring: "He had except for a few intimate friends an impossible temperament; he was proud, over-bearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a savage amour-propre and he took a childish delight in annoying; he cultivated 'le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.' ... He could not bear not to make himself felt and if he felt he was unsuccessful in this by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones. Yet he was warm-hearted, thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love if he chose.... At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to life resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet and recoiled upon himself." This is an accurate description of Me. May 26. The time will come--it's a great way off--when a joke about sex will be not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of the wonder of creation. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as impossible to joke about sex as about mind or digestion or physiology. The perfectly enfranchised poet--and Walt Whitman in "The Song of Myself" came near being it--should be as ready to sing of the incredible raptures of the sexual act between "twin souls" as of the clouds or sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful things to say but no man dare--for fear of the police, for fear of the coarse jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own highmindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus been lost to the world!