=Havana, Friday, May 10, 1912.= Another birthday, my twenty-second, and I intend this year to be the best yet. The past one has been the worst and the best; the worst because of my acute nervousness and self-consciousness and my foolish actions during the early months in Havana; best because I woke up from a lethargy and blind groping in the dark to a conscious effort to find myself and be myself; and to this end I have dedicated my twenty-second year. I do not expect to work out things to a fine point during this time, but hope to decide on a broad, general scheme of life policy of procedure and philosophy; of necessity the major part of the details will take years to work out. Hope and ambition, tempered by my experience, are dominant, and my calm periods are becoming of longer duration and more frequent occurrence, in fact, predominate to a gratifying extent lately as compared with what has gone before. I start afresh on a year’s freedom from sexual excitement, or such is my plan, for not the least of the problems to work out is that of sex. It will be hell to hold myself in check entirely in every respect, but I feel I must, in order to collect my thoughts and feelings which were becoming rather confused on this, as on other subjects, owing to my changeable moods, passions and feelings. I have the advantage of starting out on the broadest basis possible, the agnostic position as I understand it. I have not studied Spencer nor reduced my agnosticism to any dogmatic position of knowable or unknowable, but always it has been: I neither believe nor deny; my mind is open; I am willing to learn; to give all who have a serious message a hearing. True, up to the present I have not given much serious study to the problem, having read considerably more about philosophy than of it, but I have had that tendency, and, being young yet, it is perhaps best that I did not attempt to go too deeply into the problem ere this, and even now I shall go slow.