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-- It is my aim to write out that in the pages of this Me-book: no depths save as they come up and touch that, no surfaces save as they sink skin-deep. Only the flat unglowing bloody Self Just Beneath My Skin. I shall fail in it, partly because my writing skill is unequal to some nicenesses in the task, but mostly because I am not very honest even with myself. I’ll come someway near it. _Half inevitably, half by choice_ To-morrow Half inevitably, half by choice, I write this book now. I am at a lowering impatient shoulder-shrugging life-point where I must express myself or lose myself or break. And I am quite alone as I live my life. And I am unhappy--a scornful unhappiness not of bitter positive grief which admits of engulfing luxuries of sorrow, but of muffled unrests and tortures of knowing I fit in nowhere, that I drift--drift--and it brings an unbearable dread, always more and more dread, into days and into wakeful nights. And writing it turns the brunt of it a little away from me. And to write is the thing I most love to do. And I myself am the most immediate potent topic I can find in my knowledge to write on: the biggest, the littlest, the broadest, the narrowest, the loveliest, the hatefulest, the most colorful, the most drab, the most mystic, the most obvious, and the one that takes me farthest as a writer and as a person. I write myself when I write the thoughts smouldering in me whether they be of Death, of Roses, of Christ’s Mother, of Ten-penny Nails. One’s thoughts are one’s most crucial adventures. Seriously and strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done. I unfold myself in accursed and precious written thoughts. I cast the reflections of my inner selves on the paper from the insolent mirror of my Mind. --my Mind--it is so free--