A Last Diary | Page 7

is a hunt, and an adventure
rather than a study in still life. If you suffer, Balzac said proudly, at
least you live. If I were suddenly assured of wealth and health, long to
live, I should have to walk about cutting other people's throats so as to
reintroduce the element of excitement. At this present moment I am
feeling so full of joie de vivre that a summons to depart coming now
would exasperate me into fury. I should die cursing like an intoxicated
trooper. It seems unthinkable if life were the sheer wall of a precipice, I
should stick to it by force of attraction!
"You shall see in the ' Joy of Life ' how much I have grown to love it.
There is a little beast which draws its life to start with rather
precariously attached to a crab. But gradually it sends out filaments
which burrow in and penetrate every fibre of its host so that to separate
host and parasite means a grievous rupture. I have become attached in
the same way, but not to a crab!
"Life is extraordinarily distracting. At times Zoology melts away from
my purview. Gradually, I shouldn't be at all surprised if other interests
burrow in under my foundations (laid in Zoology) and the whole
superstructure collapse. If I go to a sculpture gallery, the continued
study of entomology appears impossible I will be a sculptor. If I go to
the opera, then I am going to take up music seriously. Or if I get a new
beast (an extraordinary new form of bird parasite brought back by the
New Guinea Expedition, old sport! phew !) nothing else can interest me
on earth, I think. But something does, and with a wrench I turn away
presently to fresh pastures. Life is a series of wrenches, I tremble for
the fixity of my purposes; and as you know so well, I am an ambitious
man, and my purposes are very dear to me. You see what a trembling,
colourchanging, invertebrate, jelly-fish of a brother you have. . . . But
you are the man I look to. . . ."
Whatever kind of man Barbellion may have been he certainly was not a
jelly-fish. Any or all of these sentiments might have come red-hot from
his diary, and they are absolutely typical of the delightfully stimulating
and provocative letters which he loved to write, and could write better

than any man I have ever known. He was as greedy as a shark for life in
the raw, for the whole of life. He longed to capture and comprehend the
entire universe, and would never have been content with less. "I could
swallow landscapes," he says, "and swill down sunsets, or grapple the
whole earth to me with hoops of steel, but the world is so impassive,
silent, secret." He despised his body because it impeded his pursuit of
the elusive uncapturable. And while he pursued Fate, Fate followed
close on his heels. In London he grew slowly and steadily worse.
Doctors tinkered with him, and he tinkered himself with their
ineffectual nostrums. But at last, after he had complained one day of
partial blindness and of loss of power in his right arm, I persuaded him,
on the advice of a wisely suspicious young physician, to see a
first-class nerve specialist. This man quickly discovered the secret of
his complex and never-ending symptoms. Without revealing the truth
to Barbellion, he told me that he was a doomed man, in the grip of a
horrible and obscure disease of which I had never heard. Disseminated
sclerosis was the name which the specialist gave to it; and its effect,
produced apparently by a microbe that attacks certain cells of the spinal
cord, is to destroy in the course of a few years or in some cases many
years every function of the body, killing its victim by degrees in a slow,
ruthless process of disintegration.
The specialist was strongly of the opinion that the truth should not be
told my brother. "If we do so," he said, "we shall assuredly kick him
down the hill far more quickly than he will travel if we keep him
hopeful by treating the symptoms from time to time as they arise."
Barbellion, then, was told he was not "up to standard," that he had been
working too hard, was in need of a prolonged rest, and could be
restored to health only by means of a long course of careful and regular
treatment. The fact disposes of the criticism of a few unfriendly
reviewers who, without reading the Journal closely enough to disarm
their indignation, accused Barbellion of a selfish and despicable act in
getting married when he knew himself to be dying from an incurable