I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 52
BECAUSE I am to myself someways dissatisfying and exasperating often this thing I write is dissatisfying and exasperating.
It is a true account of what is inside me. 'The wine must taste of its own grapes.'
It would be easier to make it an untrue account, for fiction is the most effortless of writing. So I have found it. And I am very clever.
I could write myself as a pretty dainty harmlessly purring one—the leopard with claws clipped and fangs drawn.
When my dynamos rest I am like that, doubtless.
But the wears and tears of breathing and the influences of varied life-details and of clothes worn and food eaten start me moving devilishly.
Phases of a score of persons, men and women, come to light in me.
To be one human being means to be monstrously mixed.
I write me out not as I might be, nor as I should be—whatever that may be—: but merely as I am.
As, Just Beneath The Skin, I am.
So my written account must come out someways dissatisfying and exasperating. Logically dissatisfying and divinely and ethically exasperating.
—a passage in Vergil tells of a Mist that is all over and about this world from the human 'tears that are falling, falling, falling always.' Something, and it may be that Mist, makes one's view of everything—everything in life—a little blurred. It may even blur one's view of oneself. So it may be I do not see myself with entire clearness—
I only know I write me as clearly as I see me, considering the Mist.