February 9

February 9 – AM          Page 106-107, To Wives, Chapter 8

Perhaps at this point we got a divorce and took the children home to father and mother.  Then we were severely criticized by our husband’s parents for desertion.  Usually we did not leave.  We stayed on and on.  We finally sought employment ourselves as destitution faced us and our families.
We began to ask medical advice as the sprees got closer together.  The alarming physical and mental symptoms, the deepening pall of remorse, depression and inferiority that settled down on our loved ones—these things terrified and distracted us.  As animals on a treadmill, we have patiently and wearily climbed, falling back in exhaustion after each futile effort to reach solid ground.  Most of us have entered the final stage with its commitment to health resorts, sanitariums, hospitals, and jails.  Sometimes there were screaming delirium and insanity.  Death was often near.
Under these conditions we naturally made mistakes.  Some of them rose out of ignorance of alcoholism.  Sometimes we sensed dimly that we were dealing with sick men.  Had we fully understood the nature of the alcoholic illness, we might have behaved differently.

February 9 – PM          Page 61-62, How It Works, Chapter 5

Our actor is self-centered—ego-centric, as people like to call it nowadays.  He is like the retired business man who lolls in the Florida sunshine in the winter complaining of the sad state of the nation; the minister who sighs over the sins of the twentieth century; politicians and reformers who are sure all would be Utopia if the rest of the world would only behave; the outlaw safe cracker who thinks society has wronged him; and the alcoholic who has lost all and is locked up.  Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity?