I Mary Maclane

Download or read book I, Mary MacLane : A Diary of Human Days written by Mary MacLane and published by Frederick A. Stokes Company. This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I, Mary MacLane : A Diary of Human Days IT is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana. The sky is overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy. And at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me. Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with great intentness. I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus: I am rare—I am in some ways exquisite. I am pagan within and without. I am vain and shallow and false. I am a specialized being, deeply myself. I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other pointes. I am dynamic but devasted, laid waste in spirit. I’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse and I’m like an outlaw. I have a potent weird sense of humor—a saving and a demoralizing grace. I have brain, cerebration—not powerful but fine and of a remarkable quality. I am scornful-tempered and I am brave. I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet. I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond. I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my truth. I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it. I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous. I am young, but not very young. I am wistful—I am infamous. In brief, I am a human being. I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling genius. And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.