The Journal of Arthur Stirling : ("The Valley of the Shadow") Part 34

But then you enemies stole away my nights and sold them to sleepless torment; ah, whither now hath the happy wisdom fled?...

As a blind man once I went a blissful way; then you threw rubbish in the blind man's way; and now he is weary of the old blind ascendings....

And once would I dance as never had I danced before; above all the heavens away would I dance. And then you lured away my dearest singer!...

Only in the dance can I speak metaphors of the highest things:--and now my highest metaphor remained unspoken in my limbs!

Unspoken and undelivered remained my highest hope! And there died all the visions and solaces of my youth!

That thing brought the tears down my cheeks. It is what my soul has cried all day and all night--that I see all my joy and all my beauty going!

It is the fearful, the agonizing _waiting_ that does it. I know it--I put it down--there is nothing kills the soul in a man so much as that. When you wait your life is outside of yourself; you hope,--you are at the mercy of others--at the mercy of indifference and accident and G.o.d knows what.

But again I cry, "What can I do? If there is anything I have not done--tell me! Tell me!"

Here I sit, and I have but seven dollars left to my name, including what I made by the shoveling. And I sit and watch the day creep on me like a wild beast on its prey--the day when I must go back into the world and toil again! Oh, it will kill me--it will kill me!

I sit and wait and hang upon the faint chance of one publisher more. It is my only chance,--and such a chance! I find myself calculating, wondering; yes, famous books have been rejected often, and still found their mark. Can I still believe that this book will shake men?

Ah, G.o.d, in my soul I do not believe it, because I have lost my inspiration! I have let go of that fire that was to drive like a wind-storm over the world.

Yes, I ask myself if such things can be! I ask myself if they were real, all those fervors and all that boldness of mine! If it was natural, that way that lived!

--Oh, and then I look back, and my heart grows sick within me.

So I spend my time, and when I turn and try to lose myself in Nietzsche, his mercilessness flings me into new despair.

January 18th.

I have the terrible gift of insensibility; and I think my insensibility torments me more than anything else in the world.

I have no life, no power, no feeling, naturally--it is all my will, it is all effort. And now that I am not striving, I sink back into a state of numbness, of dull, insensible despair. I no longer feel anything, I no longer care about anything. I pa.s.s my time in helpless impotence--and day by day I watch a thing creeping upon me as in a nightmare. I must go out into the world again and slave for my bread!

--Oh, _then_ I will feel something, I think!

Another week and more is gone, and I have but a little over four dollars.

January 20th.

I have stopped reading Nietzsche. I could not stand any more of it. It does not satisfy me.

It is not merely that I am so weak now, and that his mocking goads me. I would have been through with him in any case. He is so narrow--so one-sided.

It is reaction from the present, of course, that accounts for it. Too much gazing upon the world, that has led him to believe that love of man necessarily implies compromise.

There are two words that are absent from his writings--they are love and humanity; and so it never satisfies you, you are always discontented, you have always to correct and supply.

January 22d.

Oh why do those publishers take so long! I wait and yearn; I grow sick with waiting and yearning.

I never allowed any weakness in my soul before; I never made any terms with it. I blamed everything upon myself. And now that my whole life is weakness and misery, I writhe and struggle--I turn back always on myself, suspecting myself, blaming myself. I can not lay it to the world, I can not get into the habit--it is such a miserable habit! How many millions there are of them--poor, querulous wretches, blaming their fate, crying out against the world's injustice and neglect--crying out against the need of working, wis.h.i.+ng for this and that--discontented, impotent, miserable! Oh my G.o.d--and I am one of such!

I can not bear the sound of my own voice when I complain! I hear the world answering me--and I take the part of the world! "Why don't you be a man and go out and earn your way? Why don't you face your fate? You prate about your message--what business has a man with a message that is too much for him? What business have you with weakness--what _excuse_ have you for weakness?"

And so I came to see it. The world is right and I am all wrong! And the truth of it burns me like an acid in my brain.

January 24th.

And all the time my whole being is still restless with the storms that raged in it last spring! I have all those memories, all that poignancy.

I can not realize it--any of what I was and had--but I know it as a _fact_, a memory, and I crouch and tremble, I grow sick with it.

Why don't they write to me? My money is going!

January 26th.

The reason that I shudder so at the prospect of having to face the world again, is that I have no hope. _I have no hope!_ Once I could go out into that h.e.l.lish market. I could be any man's slave, do any drudgery--because I saw a light ahead--I saw deliverance--I had a purpose!

And now what purpose have I--what hope have I? I tell you I am a man in a trap! I can do nothing! I can do no more than if I were walled in with iron!

I say that my business in this world is to be a poet! I say that there is only one thing I can do--only one way that I can get free--and that is by doing my work, by writing books. And I have done all that I can do, I have earned my freedom--and no one will give it to me! Oh, I shall die if I am penned here much longer!

I eat out my heart, I burn up my very entrails in my frenzies. Set me free!

_Set me free!_