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Updated: May 15, 2025
Then I get up and say I ought not to put it off any longer. Then again I think: "Wait until to-morrow, at any rate." May 10th. I was looking at that man's magazine to-day. What thoughts it brought to me what agonies, what longings, what despair! And, above all, what ocean-floods of bitterness! I walked all the way down to the wholesale-paper store.
Is there any author in the world more vulgar than Macaulay? unless it be Gibbon. Or possibly Chesterfield. I have heard Chesterfield's letters referred to as a "school for gentlemen." When the world is a little bit civilized, men will read them as they now read Machiavelli's Prince. All these resolutions while I was selling wholesale-paper!
And meanwhile to spend my time alternating between this room and the wholesale-paper business! Yes, I am getting to see the truth! I am a helpless atom, struggling to survive a glimmering light in the darkness and I am going out! I am losing and what shall I do! Who will save me who will help me? I was talking to a friend yesterday; he predicted just what happened.
This is a wholesale-paper house, and the three partners who run it call themselves, with unconscious irony, "wholesale-paper MEN"! They live their lives in wholesale-paper, they talk it they dream it they plan it they have no hope in the world except to find people to buy wholesale-paper! And the manager keen and hungry he is planning to be a wholesale-paper man himself.
Now I have to drill and discipline myself anew, to learn to save my soul alive in a wholesale-paper store! It is a great, dingy place, full of chaffering, hungry-looking men. They are all desperately serious; it is a great "business house," I believe; the very atmosphere of it is deadly poison.
And here are twenty-five men and youths apparently having but one virtue in the world, the possibility of consecrating their souls to wholesale-paper! What they make is useful, it may even be sublime in which way the business is unique. But none of these men ever thinks of that they would be just as absorbed in the business if it were wholesale bonnets.
I was getting down pretty close to the limit again, but I got something to do to-day. I had to take what I could find; it is what would be called a good position, I suppose; I am in a wholesale-paper store. I get twelve dollars, and that is quite something. The business of the will is to face the things that come not any other things.
And I am to go on, I am to rouse new hunger, new passion, new agony in my soul! Why, the work that I have dreamed of next is so hard and so far-away that I hardly dared even whisper it! It would take years and years of toiling! And I am to do it here in this seething city to do it while I sell wholesale-paper to do it while I am sick for lack of food! I can not do it! I can not!
How can I be anything but beaten and wretched? How can I expect anything but defeat and ruin? A song comes to me, it calls me and I can not go! I must stare at it and watch it leave me! How can that not drive me wild? The great wings of my soul begin to beat I go up, I am wild for the air, and then suddenly I am struck back by the hideous impertinences of the wholesale-paper business!
Yes! I sell wholesale-paper, and that is bad enough; but at least I do not sell my character. I to enter into the literary business world! I to forsake my ideals and my standards to learn to please the public and the men who make money out of the public! Ah, no let me go on selling paper, and "keep my love as a thing apart no heathen shall look therein!" What could I do, besides?
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