Viewing page 116 of 143

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

- 111 -

A LOST ENTITY.

When I try to look back on that particular period of my life, I am forced to conclude that one's past self can be almost a lost entity, a stranger one imagines can be brought back, understood, and followed. But how can one pretend to understand such a composite of contrary impulses? How can one write clearly about events that being illogical are without sequence and necessarily disconcerting? I can only be intrigued and alarmed when I try to bring into focus a certain youthful being that happens to have been myself.

In many ways I had the mentality of a ten-year old School-boy: frank and candid to a degree, but with a personal code that made small distinctions between what is generally called vice and virtue according to religions and fashions. These had no particular importance when dealing with my mother and brother. If I disliked certain conditions which existed at Neuilly, it was not that they offended my morals; rather it was that they hurt some aesthetic which, fortunately, I did possess. This sensibility was to be my sole ballast.

At that particular moment my plans for living the life of an artist were, of necessity, pushed aside by the immediate urge for freedom. I see myself alone, pathetically inadequate, claiming of the world only the little I was capable of receiving. Yet, though it may be hard to detect in the following narrative, there already existed something that was bound to expand, an unconscious sincerity of effort that would bring about its own ultimate form of expression.