Who, looking at the portraits of Shelley, of Keats, of Byron, of Milton, and of Poe, can wonder that these were poets? All were beautiful, all were beloved and admired, all had in love warmth of life and heavenly joy, as far as any poet, or indeed any man, can have.

“I have always had in consideration”

 

I have always had in consideration a case which is extremely interesting and which brings up* a problem not the less interesting. I considered the case of a man becoming immortal under a pseudonym, his real name hidden and unknown. Such a man would, thinking upon it, not consider himself really immortal but an unknown, [destined] to be immortal in deed. “And yet what is the name?” he would consider. Nothing at all. “What then,” I said to myself, “is immortality in art, in poesy, in anything whatsoever?”

Three Prose Fragments
Charles Robert Anon

 

1.

 

Ten thousand times my heart broke within me. I cannot count the sobs that shook me, the pains that ate into my heart.

Yet I have seen other things also which have brought tears into mine eyes and have shaken me like a stirred leaf. I have seen men and women giving life, hopes, all for others. I have seen such acts of high devotedness that I have wept tears of gladness. These things, I have thought, are beautiful, although they are powerless to redeem. They are the pure rays of the sun on the vast dung-heap of the world.

* * *

 

2.

 

I saw the little children ...

A hatred of institutions, of conventions, kindled my soul with its fire. A hatred of priests and kings rose in me like a flooded stream. I had been a Christian, warm, fervent, sincere; my emotional, sensitive nature demanded food for its hunger, fuel for its fire. But when I looked upon these men and women, suffering and wicked, I saw how little they deserved the curse of a further hell. What greater hell than this life? What greater curse than living? “This free will,” I cried to myself, “this also is a convention and a falsehood invented by men that they might punish and slay and torture with the word ‘justice,’ which is a nickname of crime. ‘Judge not,’ the Bible has it—the Bible; ‘judge not, that ye may not be judged!’”

When I had been a Christian I had thought men responsible for the ill they did—I hated tyrants, I cursed kings and priests. When I had shaken off the immoral, the false influence of the philosophy of Christ, I hated tyranny, kinghood, priestdom—evil in itself. Kings and priests I pitied because they were men.

3.

 

I, Charles Robert Anon, being, animal, mammal, tetrapod, primate, placental, ape, catarrhina, … man; eighteen years of age, not married (except at odd moments), megalomaniac, with touches of dipsomania, dégénéré supérieur, poet, with pretensions to written humor, citizen of the world, idealistic philosopher, etc. etc. (to spare the reader further pains)—

in the name of TRUTH, SCIENCE, and PHILOSOPHIA, not with bell, book, and candle but with pen, ink, and paper—

pass sentence of excommunication on all priests and all sectarians of all religions in the world.

Excommunicabo vos.
Be damned to you all.
Ainsi-soit-il.

Reason, Truth, Virtue per C. R. A.

 

“I am tired of confiding in myself

 

July 25, 1907

I am tired of confiding in myself, of lamenting over myself, of pitying mine own self with tears. I have just had a kind of scene with Aunt Rita* over F. Coelho.* At the end of it I felt again one of those symptoms which grow clearer and ever more horrible in me: a moral vertigo. In physical vertigo there is a whirling of the external world about us; in moral vertigo, of the interior world. I seemed for a moment to lose the sense of the true relations of things, to lose comprehension, to fall into an abyss of mental abeyance. It is a horrible sensation, one that prompts* inordinate fear. These feelings are becoming common, they seem to pave my way to a new mental life, which shall of course be madness.

In my family there is no comprehension of my mental state—no, none. They laugh at me, sneer at me, disbelieve me; they say I wish to be extraordinary. They neglect to analyze the wish to be extraordinary.