A Writer's Diary (1918 - 1941) - Complete edition

I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say ‘This is it’? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it—that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it’. It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact—a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But on this showing, which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this ‘it’; and then feel quite at rest.

The truth is that I have an internal, automatic scale of values; which decides what I had better do with my time.

Anyhow I was very glad to go on with my Byron. He has at least the male virtues. In fact, Im amused to find how easily I can imagine the effect he had upon women - especially upon rather stupid or uneducated women, unable to stand up to him.