Mary McClane's Self-Introduction
It is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana. The sky is
overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy. And at this point I
meet Me face to face.
I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly
and damnably important to Me.
Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with great
intentness.
I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming trivial
Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:
I am rare--I am in some ways exquisite.
I am pagan within and without.
I am vain and shallow and false.
I am a specialized being, deeply myself.
I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other
pointes.
I am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit.
I am like a leopard and I'm like a poet and I'm like a religieuse and
I'm like an outlaw.
I have a potent weird sense of humor--a saving and a demoralizing
grace.
I have brain, cerebration--not powerful but fine and of a remarkable
quality.
I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.
I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.
I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.
I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my
truth.
I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.
I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.
I am young, but not very young.
I am wistful--I am infamous.
In brief, I am a human being.
I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling
genius.
[Mary Maclane, her diary, 1917. See also the Mary Maclane website.]
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