“I object most strongly to a personal immortality. Immortality! Wretched ideal. Infinite ennui — I die at the thought.”

A provocative youthful rejection of personal immortality on grounds of endless weariness · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

• Belief
• Eternity
• Mortality

“I have been frightfully busy, having rashly undertaken to make a little Pierrot play in verse for Peters... So until this period of severe mental agony be past, I can go nowhere.”

Turning the pressure of writing to a deadline into typically theatrical self-mockery · Letter to Victor Plarr, 24 October 1892

• Humour
• Work
• Writing

“This is a profound saying. Theism, Pantheism, Christianity, Positivism — they lie so close together that it is like splitting hairs to consider them apart. The vital issue is between optimism and pessimism.”

Showing the young Dowson framing belief chiefly through the opposition between hopeful and pessimistic views of existence · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

• Belief
• Despair
• Thought