FROM THE JOURNALS OF DENTON WELCH -
"It is quite true that a general unwillingness to appreciate robs most people of their eyes. nose, mouth, ears, limbs." (Jan. 1946)
"I know tonight that is best for me to be alone most of the time - near people who wish me well and like to see me, but alone for in loneness everything seems to grow into its proper place and there is hardly any waste of spirit." (May 1946)
"Yet it is most important to have people near one that one need hardly see. Without this consciousness of other human beings I think almost all of us are liable to be to be swamped by the power of matter. One's strength is not enough to bear this with no other help near." (May 1946)
"I do not think that people want love most, they need the settled reverie, the calm testing and tasting of their past and the world's past." (May 1946)
"It seems that my happiness only comes from being a monk; and when I am not a monk, therefore I cannot be happy." (May 1946)
"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 or hide it forever..."
"It becomes more right an acceptable to believe to believe that the other things in th3e world were made for nus to enjoy, if we think that we were made to be enjoyed." (September 1946)
"Sight, sound, touch were all distorted I was living in a twisted stretched world, where I invaded everything and was the horror that I could not escape. There was no self-love left, only an exhausted disgust." (Jan. 1947)
"I feel angry and impatient all the time I am writing. It seems that nothing flows... I have to push my pen through wads of cotton-wool, and outside men are emptying the cesspool." (Aug. 1947)
"As I looked out into the dark wet night, I longed bitterly for my strength and health, nothing more, just the old things I had lost and am almost too ashamed to write about." (October 1947)
"Frustration like this has never come to me before...(Jan. 1948)
"I am aware of the thinness, the affectation and strain of what I write." (March 1948)
"Death seems so far away; it recedes and becomes more and more impossible as one grows iller." (August 1948)
"A journal should be more a solace than it is. Half the time one is angry with it for its shoddiness and its inadequacy." (August 1948)
Denton Welch died at two o'clock in the afternoon of 30th December, 1948
He was thirty-three
In Piam Memoriam
