Katherine Mansfield (1888 – 1923)
Born Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp, was a New Zealand poet and writer of short fiction, who wrote under the name Katherine Mansfield.
When I say "I fear" don't let it disturb you, dearest heart. We all fear when we are in waiting-rooms. Yet we must pass beyond them, and if the other can keep calm, it is all the help we can give each other.
By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love the earth and the wonders thereof the sea the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. A want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and its no good theres only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun.
The world to me is a dream and the people in it are sleepers. I have known a few instances of intensity but that is all. I want to find a world in which these instances are united. Shall I succeed? I scarcely care. What is important is to try & learn to live, and in relation to everything not isolated. This isolation is death to me.
Were we positive, eager, real alive? No, we were not. We were a nothingness shot with gleams of what might be.
I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter.) But warm, eager, living life to be rooted in life to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.
To work to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do.
Warm, eager, living life to be rooted in life to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. ... This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, its no longer so. I feel happy deep down. All is well.