A Last Diary | Page 7

of wealth and health, long to live, I should have to walk about cutting other people's throats so as to reintroduce the element of excitement. At this present moment I am feeling so full of joie de vivre that a summons to depart coming now would exasperate me into fury. I should die cursing like an intoxicated trooper. It seems unthinkable if life were the sheer wall of a precipice, I should stick to it by force of attraction!
"You shall see in the ' Joy of Life ' how much I have grown to love it. There is a little beast which draws its life to start with rather precariously attached to a crab. But gradually it sends out filaments which burrow in and penetrate every fibre of its host so that to separate host and parasite means a grievous rupture. I have become attached in the same way, but not to a crab!
"Life is extraordinarily distracting. At times Zoology melts away from my purview. Gradually, I shouldn't be at all surprised if other interests burrow in under my foundations (laid in Zoology) and the whole superstructure collapse. If I go to a sculpture gallery, the continued study of entomology appears impossible I will be a sculptor. If I go to the opera, then I am going to take up music seriously. Or if I get a new beast (an extraordinary new form of bird parasite brought back by the New Guinea Expedition, old sport! phew !) nothing else can interest me on earth, I think. But something does, and with a wrench I turn away presently to fresh pastures. Life is a series of wrenches, I tremble for the fixity of my purposes; and as you know so well, I am an ambitious man, and my purposes are very dear to me. You see what a trembling, colourchanging, invertebrate, jelly-fish of a brother you have. . . . But you are the man I look to. . . ."
Whatever kind of man Barbellion may have been he certainly was not a jelly-fish. Any or all of these sentiments might have come red-hot from his diary, and they are absolutely typical of the delightfully stimulating and provocative letters which he loved to write, and could write better than any man I have ever known. He was as greedy as a shark for life in the raw, for the whole of life. He longed to capture and comprehend the entire universe, and would never have been content with less. "I could swallow landscapes," he says, "and swill down sunsets, or grapple the whole earth to me with hoops of steel, but the world is so impassive, silent, secret." He despised his body because it impeded his pursuit of the elusive uncapturable. And while he pursued Fate, Fate followed close on his heels. In London he grew slowly and steadily worse. Doctors tinkered with him, and he tinkered himself with their ineffectual nostrums. But at last, after he had complained one day of partial blindness and of loss of power in his right arm, I persuaded him, on the advice of a wisely suspicious young physician, to see a first-class nerve specialist. This man quickly discovered the secret of his complex and never-ending symptoms. Without revealing the truth to Barbellion, he told me that he was a doomed man, in the grip of a horrible and obscure disease of which I had never heard. Disseminated sclerosis was the name which the specialist gave to it; and its effect, produced apparently by a microbe that attacks certain cells of the spinal cord, is to destroy in the course of a few years or in some cases many years every function of the body, killing its victim by degrees in a slow, ruthless process of disintegration.
The specialist was strongly of the opinion that the truth should not be told my brother. "If we do so," he said, "we shall assuredly kick him down the hill far more quickly than he will travel if we keep him hopeful by treating the symptoms from time to time as they arise." Barbellion, then, was told he was not "up to standard," that he had been working too hard, was in need of a prolonged rest, and could be restored to health only by means of a long course of careful and regular treatment. The fact disposes of the criticism of a few unfriendly reviewers who, without reading the Journal closely enough to disarm their indignation, accused Barbellion of a selfish and despicable act in getting married when he knew himself to be dying from an incurable malady. Whether I was right or wrong in accepting the medical man's advice, I do not regret the course I took. Barbellion, in a moment of overwhelming despair at the tragedy