The Journal of a Disappointed Man

May 14. Returned home. I hate living in this little town. If some one dies, he is sure to be some one you had a joke with the night before. A suicide--ten to one--implicates your bosom friend, or else the little man at the bookshop cut him down. There have been three deaths since I came home--I knew them all. It depresses me. The town seems a mortuary with all these dead bodies lying in it. Lucky for you, if you're a fat, rubicund, unimaginative physician. May 16. Two more people dead--one a school friend. Sat on a seat on the river bank and read the Journal of Animal Behaviour. It made me long to be at work. I foamed at the mouth to be sitting there perforce in an overcoat on a seat doing nothing like a pet dove. A weak heart makes crossing a road an adventure and turns each day into a dangerous expedition. May 18. A dirty ragamuffin on the river's bank held up a tin can to me with the softly persuasive words,-- "'Ere, Mister, BAIT." "What are you going to do with it?" "Fish." "What for?" "Salmon." We have all tried to catch salmon with a bent pin. No matter though if no salmon be caught. Richard Jefferies said, "If there be no immortality still we shall have had the glory of that thought." May 19. Old Diaries Spent some happy time reading over old diaries. I was grieved and surprised to find how much I had forgotten. To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves--those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and modestly to rest.