29 April

29 April 1920

Travelling to London

When autograph albums were the fashion - sumptuous volumes bound in soft leather, the pages so delicately tinted that each tender sentiment had its own sunset sky to faint, to die upon - the popularity of that most sly, ambiguous, difficult piece of advice: "To thine own self be true" was the despair of collectors. How dull it was, how boring, to have the same thing written six times over. And then, even if it was Shakespeare that didn't prevent it - oh, l'age d'innocence! - from being dreadfully obvious! Of course it followed as the night the day that if one was true to oneself . . . True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many - well, really, thats what it looks like coming to - hundreds of selves. For what with complexes and suppressions, and reactions and vibrations and reflections - there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests.
Nevertheless, there are signs that we are intent as never before on trying to puzzle out, to live by, our own particular self. Der mensch muss frei sein - free, disentangled, single. Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood is explained our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent, which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the leaves and through the mould, thrusts a sealed bud through years of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free and - we are alive - we are flowering for our moment upon the earth. This is the moment which, after all, we live for, the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal.  [KM Notebooks, undated.]