I might have gone on through years and decades and lumps of months knowing at best a little of some rare person, a little less or more of another rare person, a little of a musician’s soul in a nocturne, a little of a dead poet’s splendors. But to Me and my own fine spirit-relationships to those things I could remain, but for my radiant flawed egotistic interpreting, eternally strange. But for it I’d not have the wit to perceive the one human being in the world I may know with vitalness: my own Self. I should drop into my grave at last without a good-by to the glowing one who was locked just inside, whose hand I’d never clasped, whose sad prescient eyes I’d never looked in, who was then flitting out and on and away. It is a being cruel and transfiguring and terrifying: terribly worth clasping close and breathing with. And some days it sleeps, sleeps like the dead: it is delicater than rose-vapors before the dawn: a sun-blown faëry thing. When it sleeps I’m left alone. Then comes a doubtful dreadful quiet, a hell of dumbness that only God could reach. It is as if neither God nor I attempts to cope with it. _Bastard lacy valentines_ To-morrow The thing I admire most is strength. The thing I most hate is Weakness, of each and every kind. All the reassuring things in the world are in and of the strong deeds done in it. All the mischief and despair come from human Weakness. I would better strongly murder my foe than forgive him Weakly for my seeming advantage. I would be happier in my mind as a careful charwoman than as a loose-jointed poet. I would rather have a farthing’s value as a faithful concubine than no value as a slattern housewife. Strength repays itself with strength--and with magnificence. Truth is strength nearly always: and _not_ always. To cheat strongly in the life-game gets me more than does Weak easy honesty. By being a strong man Napoleon brought home the bacon. Being an honest one would have got him not one rasher of the bacon of _his_ desire. The race is too ridden with ‘temperament’ to let truth be its prevailing force. But strength plows its scornful way through temperament like a steam-shovel. The bacon Napoleon brought home he took from other people, causing them misery. They were Weak and let him take it, or they were strong and got killed trying to keep it. To get killed trying to keep your bacon is to be even stronger than the Napoleon who lives and takes it from you. Those who sit still and _let_ Napoleon get their bacon are fit only to be themselves made into bacon. Truth belongs with love, with friendship, with charity, with psychic lovingkindness: with all the altruistic graces and tendernesses. But in the mere grinding livingness of things it is to be strong. I say to Me, ‘Mary MacLane, be strong: whether you’re living joyous on a hill or mournful in a valley, make shift to be strong.’