I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 51
ALSO I am dissatisfying to myself.
My thoughts smother me: they keep me from life.
I am a hundred times more introspective than most people, most women. Most women, even conventional ones, are lawless—the more conventional, the more lawless usually.
And so most women beat me to life. Where they yield to an impulse the moment they feel it—I, because an impulse itself is adventure-fabric—I feel of its quality, test it for defects, wash a little corner of it to see if the color will run—and conclude not to use it.
That I gaze inward at the garbled biograph of Me keeps me from several sorts of violent action.
I have violent action in me, chained in analysis.
Most women are secretly lawless on the old plan inaugurated by Eve—of inclining to do anything forbidden, of hugging everything they are unsupposed to hug, of determinedly kicking over the traces when coerced too much. The ban is the chief attraction.
It's but little like that with me. There would be point and purpose in my Action. But it is kept in stupor by analysis.
I am malcontent about that, though I live upon analysis. I hate the inaction and inertia that follow on its heels.
I could be an anarchist. I condemn anarchists but not as I condemn Me. I would respect me more were I this moment prisoned in a real bastile for having stuck a good knife into a bad king. I could feel, no matter how foolish and mistaken in itself the act, that I had done the strong and brave thing at sacrifice of my personal selves. The dry living-death of the prison would be compensated for each day when I said to Me, 'It was a needful honorable act and I did it: for once in my life I was a Regular Person.'
There would be a nourishment in being able to tell that to myself. There would be warming food in owning one so brave remembrance of myself
But, my Soul-and-bones!—at the very moment of lifting the good knife a thought would come: 'How is this king worse than another? What rotten rascal mightn't rise in his place?' And on with a lightning-trail of analysis till my pale hand dropped inert and the knife in it grew harmless as a lily-petal.
It isn't that I haven't the guts. I have.
I am a wild mare in foal: and unfoaling.