7 August 1939 – 13 August 1939

I am now going to make the rash and bold experiment of breaking off, from condensing Vision and Design; to write here for 10 minutes instead of revising, as I ought, my morning’s grind. Oh yes, I thought of several things to write about. Not exactly diary. Reflections. That’s the fashionable dodge. Peter Lucas and Gide both at it. Neither can settle to creative art. (I think, sans Roger, I could.) It’s the comment —the daily interjection—that comes handy in times like these. I too feel it. But what was I thinking? I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us. That’s clear in an MS I’m reading. If I say this, So-and-so will think me sentimental. If that . . . will think me bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors. Hence their selfconsciousness, their restlessness. It would be worth while trying to discover what they are at the moment. Did Wordsworth have them? I doubt it. I read “Ruth” before breakfast. Its stillness, its unconsciousness, its lack of distraction, its concentration and the resulting “beauty” struck me. As if the mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl. That’s an idea for an article. The figurative expression is that all the surroundings of the mind have come much closer. A child crying in the field brings poverty: my comfort; to mind. Ought I to go to the village sports? “Ought” thus breaks into my contemplation. Oh and I thought, as I was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, and not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as birth is. I must now return to my grind, I think rather refreshed.

My grind has left me dazed and depressed. How on earth to bring off this chapter? God knows.