If my soul could awaken fully perhaps I might be lifted out of myself--surely I should be. But my soul is not awake. It is awakening, trying to open its eyes; and it is crying out blindly after something, but it can not _know_. I have a dreadful feeling that it will stay always like this. Oh, I feel everything--everything! I feel what might be. And there is Nothing. There are six tooth-brushes. Would I stop for a few fine distinctions, a theory, a natural law even, to escape from this into Happiness--or into something greatly less? Misery--misery! If only I could feel it less! Oh, the weariness, the weariness--as I await the Devil’s coming. February 8. Often I walk out to a place on the flat valley below the town, to flirt with Death. There is within me a latent spirit of coquetry, it appears. Down on the flat there is a certain deep, dark hole with several feet of water at the bottom. This hole completely fascinates me. Sometimes when I start out to walk in a quite different direction, I feel impelled almost irresistibly to turn and go down on the flat in the direction of the fascinating, deep black hole. And here I flirt with Death. The hole is so narrow--only about four feet across--and so dark, and so deep! I don’t know whether it was intended to be a well, or whether it is an abandoned shaft of some miner. At any rate it is isolated and deserted, and it has a rare loving charm for me. I go there sometimes in the early evening, and kneel on the edge of it and lean over the dark pit, with my hand grasping a wooden stake that is driven into the ground near by. And I drop little stones down and hear them splash hollowly, and it sounds a long way off. There is something wonderfully soothing, wonderfully comforting to my unrestful, aching wooden heart in the dark mystery of this fascinating hole. Here is the End for me, if I want it--here is the Ceasing, when I want it. And I lean over and smile quietly. “No flowers,” I say softly to myself, “no weeping idiots, no senseless funeral, no oily undertaker fussing over my woman’s-body, no useless Christian prayers. Nothing but this deep dark restful grave.” No one would ever find it. It is a mile and a half from any house.