What Others Were Feeling Like Today #7

I haven't managed one of these posts in ages, for reasons I'm not quite sure of. They haven't gone away though. For newer readers, these are diary entries written on today's date, in whatever year is listed above them. They're taken from The Assassin's Cloak.

1938

Listened to Hitler's Nuremberg speech on the radio. The call to arms permits a facile eloquence, and it is easier to lead men to combat and stir up their passions than to temper them and urge them to the patient labours of peace. the flattery springs from this: that the affirmation of strength contains a permission of stupidity.

André Gide


1946

Two thoughts:

(1) Do not worry too much about the indiscretion, foolishness or banality of what you write. Leave Time to take care of it all - either to kill it and hide it forever, or else to change it in its magical way into something strange and rare and not silly at all. This diary, if it is read at all, will make no one blush two hundred years from now. Someone might blush a little in a hundred years, just as I have squirmed after reading some of Keats's earliest poems this morning.

(2) It becomes more right and acceptable to believe that the other things in the world were made for us to enjoy, if we think that we were made to be enjoyed.

These truisms pounced on me very early in the morning, when I was half in dreamland.

Denton Welch