ciferate, as a Parrot in the great cage
of the World, I hop, screeching, 'What I say is!' from perch to perch.

SHRINKAGE

Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations; then all the
vast life of the Universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks,
it dwindles; and of all that flood which over-brimmed the bowl of the
great Cosmos, there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon.

VOICES

'You smoke too much!' whispers the still small voice of Conscience.

'You are a failure, nobody likes you,' Self-contempt keeps muttering.

'What's the good of it all?' sighs Disillusion, arid as a breath from
the Sahara.

I can't tell you how all these Voices bore me; but I can listen all day
with grave attention to that suave bosom-Jesuit who keeps on unweariedly
proving that everything I do is done for the public good, and all my
acts and appetites and inclinations in the most amazing harmony with
Pure Reason and the dictates of the Moral Law.

EVANESCENCE

How the years pass and life changes, how all things float down the
stream of Time and vanish; how friendships fade, and illusions crumble,
and hopes dissolve, and solid piece after piece of soap melts away in
our hands as we wash them!

COMPLACENCY

Dove-grey and harmless as a dove, full of piety and innocence and pure
thoughts, my Soul brooded unaffectedly within me--I was only half
listening to that shrill conversation. And I began to wonder, as more
than once in little moments like this of self-esteem I have wondered,
whether I might not claim to be something more, after all, than a mere
echo or compilation--might not claim in fact to possess a distinct
personality of my own. Might it not be worth while, I now asked myself,
to follow up this pleasing conjecture, to retire like Descartes from the
world, and spend the rest of life, as he spent it, trying to prove my
own existence?

MY PORTRAIT

For after all I am no amoeba, no mere sack and stomach; I am capable
of discourse, can ride a bicycle, look up trains in Bradshaw; in fact, I
am and calmly boast myself a Human Being--that Masterpiece of Nature, a
rational, polite, meat-eating Man.

What stellar collisions and conflagrations, what floods and slaughters
and enormous efforts has it not cost the Universe to make me--of what
astral periods and cosmic processes am I not the crown and wonder?

Where, then, is the Esplanade or Alp or earth-dominating Te