s his Aim explicitly in the sight of all men. Those
who have no real political experience can scarcely imagine the immense
mental and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts and
utterances on the one hand and the "thinking-out" process on the other.
It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a
scheme essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility
while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation
you tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented
march of affairs....

The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual
autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements
of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle
details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean
values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities of
sleepless nights....

And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, to
begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled, experimenting way.
To go into a study to think about statecraft is to turn your back on the
realities you are constantly needing to feel and test and sound if your
thinking is to remain vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despite
of all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It
is no use dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap
haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the whole
world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a poker to a
failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get something done," but
the only sane thing to do for the moment is to put aside that poker and
take thought and get a better implement....

One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to conceal.
It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position that this should
happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no power to phrase
things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I had stage-managed our
"serious" conversations. Now I was too much in earnest and too uncertain
to go on doing this. I avoided talk with her. Her serene, sustained
confidence in vague formulae and sentimental aspirations exasperated me;
her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my
changing attitudes distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was a