Activity

10/7/43

How delicate is the scale in which an artist weighs his worth. It must be delicate. There must be no overconfidence in the sustaining of his creative period: there must be confidence only in his honesty, and in nothing else. The reprimand of some slight fault, the polishing of a piece of…

7/25/43

My own work is unfinished, and I owe a great debt to all those who have fed and clothed me all these years. I owe a different debt to the one I love best. All the tears I should have shed in a long lifetime are coming now and mean nothing to me. There is no life nor truth without the one…

How prosaic to relate this experience, these importunate, irrevocable, ineluctable facts!

1/27/43

I came home one night towards midnight, so drunk with alcohol and cigarette and sleepiness that I weaved from one side of the pavement to the other. Out of a Third Avenue bar came a boy and girl about sixteen. “Take care of that cold!” the girl said with all the love, warmth, sacrificial…

The lineaments of my face establish themselves in handsome sanity and complacency: inside is labefaction and imminent death.