Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/85

 At eighteen I said to me: 'I'm lonely but some day I may be happily friendshiped and apprehended and it will be like paradise.'

Now I say to me: 'I'm lonely by fate and by nature and temperament. I've known some friendships of vivid alluringness and informingness—they await me now in the offing. And others. There is paradise in it—an odd sweet dubious paradise. But what's the use—?'

It's that what's-the-use, born of the lower vantage-ground and the closing-in shadows, that chiefly makes me lonely—lonely to a desperateness and on through to a ruinous calm.

It is this metaphysic loneliness which breeds in me one constant reasonless restless urgent motif: to Express me: not of-the-past except desultorily, not of-the-future save indifferently: but of my low-toned, low-echoing now. Until I've Expressed me there's no setting open the gates of my spirit to a passer-by, though the passer-by should be a poet-in-the-flesh, a god, an angel with a torch.

Four-and-twenty turbulent moods may break over me in a day, or four-and-twenty passive ones, or four-and-twenty someway joyous ones. But like the theme in a fugue this loud tranquil recurrent need to Express me transcends them all.

It is a big voracious part-human bird of prey. Of