Activity

1/16/45

[...] I have a candle on my coffee table, candles are so beautiful at midday, with the snow’s gray glare and the gloom of the room on the side away from the windows. Henry James sits on a shelf, inviting me to forget my brief and unimportant day and stay with him in a slow moving, rarifi…

a discarded but upright Christmas tree that sits in a corner of the little lawn in my court. The chiaroscuro of its branches half covered with snow suggest the pen lines of an artist

1/8/45

To live one’s life in the best way possible, one must live and move always with a sense of unreality, of drama in the smallest things, as though one lived a poem or a novel, attaching the greatest importance to the route one takes to a favorite restaurant, believing oneself while browsing…

11/24/44

Perils of a first novel: Every character is one’s self, resulting in an oversoft or overhard treatment, neither of which results in the objective, which is essentially what has made good so much of the writing one has done before.

11/14/44

Shall I say I can work when I am most unhappy? Perhaps this is the only way I can dupe myself, the only way that will let me produce any work. Anything, you know, to get one’s mind off oneself.