My ancestors in their Highlands--some of them--were endowed with second sight. My genius is not in the least like second sight. That savors of the supernatural, the mysterious. My genius is a sound, sure, earthly sense, with no suggestion of mystery or occultism. It is an inner sense that enables me to feel and know things that I could not possibly put into thought, much less into words. It makes me know and analyze with deadly minuteness every keen, tiny damnation in my terrible lonely life. It is a mirror that shows me myself and something in myself in a merciless brilliant light, and the sight at once sickens and maddens me and fills me with an unnamed woe. It is something unspeakably dreadful. The sight for the time deadens all thought in my mind. It freezes my reason and intellect. Logic can not come to my aid. I can only feel and know the thing and it analyzes itself before my eyes. I am alone with this--alone, alone, alone! There is no pitiful hand extended from the heights--there is no human being--ah, there is Nothing. How can I bear it! Oh, I ask you--how can I bear it! March 10. My genius is an element by itself, and it is not a thing that I can tell in so many words. But it makes itself felt in every point of my life. This book would be a very different thing if I were not a genius--though I am not a literary genius. Often people who come in contact with me and hear me utter a few commonplace remarks feel at once that I am extraordinary. I am extraordinary. I have tried longingly, passionately, to think that even this sand and barrenness is mine. But I can not. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it, like all good things, is beyond me. It has something that I also have. In that is our bond of sympathy. But the sand and barrenness itself is not mine. Always I think there is but one picture in the world more perfect in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness. It is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves. Nothing could be more divinely appropriate. The art in it is ravishingly perfect. It is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world for all time. As I see it before my mind I can think only of its utter perfectness. I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed. The deed and the art are perfect. Its perfectness ravishes my senses. And within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and barrenness--knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine--is only second to it. March 11. Sometimes when I go out on the barrenness my mind wanders afar. To-day it went to Greece. Oh, it was very beautiful in Greece!