[…] The amount of minute and delicate joy I get out of watching people and things when I am alone is simply enormous - I really only have ‘perfect fun’ with myself. When I see a little girl running by on her heels like a fowl in the wet, and say ‘My dear, there’s a gertie,’ I laugh and enjoy it as I never would with anybody. Just the same applies to my feeling for what is called ‘nature.’ Other people won’t stop and look at the things I want to look at or, if they do, they stop to please me or to humour me or to keep the peace. But I am so made that as sure as I am with anyone, I begin to give consideration to their opinions and their desires, and they are not worth half the consideration that mine are. […] Life with other people becomes a blur: it does with J., but it’s enormously valuable and marvellous when I’m alone, the detail of life, the life of life.
Katherine Mansfield, diary entry (mid 1915).
