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Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada
My virtue is that I say what I think, my vice that what I think doesn't amount to much.

Saturday, October 21, 2017

'I am dying but you are already a corpse': the 100-year-old multiple sclerosis diary that became a classic


"One hundred years ago today, WNP Barbellion scrawled his final diary entry. “Self-disgust,” he wrote. Ravaged by multiple sclerosis at just 28, this one word was all he could manage, before his hand was too unsteady to go on. He had been recording his daily life – and, latterly, the daily encroachment of death – since his first entry when he was 15: “Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned for the time being the idea of writing on ‘How Cats Spend their Time’.” His diary would be published in 1919 as The Journal of a Disappointed Man, to wide acclaim but it is sadly little known nowadays."

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Follow WNP Barbellion on twitter @WNP_Barbellion

The complete works of Barbellion online

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