Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion was the nom-de-plume of Bruce Frederick Cummings. His father was a reporter, a job the author took up unhappily and continued after his father's death in order to support the family. His real and first love was nature, and through self-study he trained as an entomologist and secured a fairly routine position at the British Museum. Self-study also gave him an impressive entry to literature, poetry and ideas.
The journal tracks the disappointments of a young man who had soaring ambitions. Lack of optimal conditions of birth, especially by social class' were coupled with chronic illness. This was to be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis at the age of 26, not many years before he died. He was treated with arsenic and strychnine, enduring pain, paralysis and general malaise. Despite this, the book has a tone of extreme vivacity, both psychological and physical extremes of pain and joy described with some beautiful writing.
He was, in his most depressed times, full of self loathing, yet for the reader tangential to his misery are many acute observations of the wiles of human nature such as: "....for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of expression, egotists, and our desire is to think and if possible talk and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the world—or as much as we can conveniently assemble—for audience."
The journal really does capture the essence of a life as well as extolling the beauties of nature and reminding us of our common foibles. In spite of the cruelty of fate's bringing so much of suffering to this life, we do well to ponder one of his later observations: "You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless, paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence."
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