Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/17

 So does in secret each man and woman and child who breathes, but is afraid to sing it aloud. And mostly none knows it is that he does sing. But it is the only strength of each. A bishop serving truly and tirelessly the poor of his diocese serves a strong vanity and ideal of the Ego in himself. A starving sculptor who lives in and for his own dreams is an Egotist equally with the bishop. And both are Egotists equally with me.

Egotist, not egoist, is my word: it and not the idealized one is the 'winged word.'

It is made of glow and gleam and splendor, that Ego. I would be its votary.

So I write me this book of Me—my Soul, my Heart, my sentient Body, my magic Mind: their potentialities and contradictions.

—there is a Self in each human one which lives and has its sweet vain someway-frightful being not in depths and not in surfaces but Just Beneath The Skin. It is the Self one keeps for oneself alone. It is the Essence of soul and bones. It is the slyest subtlest thing in human scope. It is the loneliest: tragically lonely. It is long, long isolation—beautiful, terrifying, barbarous, shameful, trivial to points of madness, ever-present, infinitely intriguing to oneself, passionately hidden: hidden forever and forever—