Tuesday 1st September 1936

My God! Writing those simple words – “Till day be done…” made my eyes wet!
Perhaps – If this should be like the lengthening shadows of 1933! Who knows?

Sometimes the hellish bustle of life pauses just a moment and Beauty, tragical beauty, pours in like a flood. Just a sense of loveliness. In a few moments it is gone and I who have felt it – I sniff, then put away my handkerchief and light a cigarette. I am smoking a cigarette now. That moment of sweet bitterness is gone. Too late for me to express what it was!
What was that half fear, half hope that I felt, that I almost saw?
A little ending before a new beginning?

Someday, these lines may be read, perhaps by another. Probably when I am long since dead and unable to explain… If you cannot understand everything in this diary, please be lenient, unknown reader. Don’t say “Damn not!” at once! The writer was a very ordinary, normal person who – like all of us, surely? – had his intervals of madness. Unlike all of us, I have put just a little of the sense of those moods on paper. On paper it remains and is read – by you.