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5/25/41
It’s so important that people—especially young people write some poetry during their lives. Even if it is bad poetry. Even if they think they do not like poetry or have no talent for writing it, they should write, and even badly, if it is sincere. And really sincere poetry is seldom bad even if the form is not perfect. But the poetry opens a new vista of the world. It is not so much that we see new things, but that we see old things differently. And this experience is invaluable. It is as soul-shaking as the experience of love. It is more ennobling. It makes philosophers and kings.
6/21/41
We like to say it is love we search our whole life long, or we like to say it is Fame. But it is neither. It is understanding. We seek forever one other human heart we can touch and who can touch ours. We seek indefatigably like a hungry animal. For our heart is forever lonely. Forever alone. And wherever we feel this understanding may be, in a young girl, a young boy, a feeble old man, or a crone of a woman, in a drunkard, in a prostitute, in a madman, in a child, there we will go, and nothing in the world can hold us back.
6/22/41
There are some people we like instantly, before they have even had a chance to flatter us (which is the greatest encouragement to liking a person), because they have that quality of seeing in us what we desire to be, what we are trying to be, and of not seeing that which we are at the moment. We feel that they understand us, we begin to feel that we have attained what we desire ourselves to be, and being made happy by this we inevitably are very fond of the people who can make us feel this way.
jesus
7/29/41
What I admire most in an individual is a kind of activity—a liveliness either of mind or body or both—which alone can assure the development of the character I prefer. I believe liveliness and animal energy are the sine qua nons.
AUGUST 15, 1941
[...] I want to sit down at a typewriter in a room all alone. I want long days to mull over what I’ve seen, silent hours to dream out stories that are as delicate, in the first plot germs, as smoke rings. And long evenings, which will be fewer now, I imagine, with Rosalind. [...]
This summer I have climbed, like a struggling Junebug on a fluted lamppost, to a higher ledge. A kind of higher standard, but above all a new hope and confidence. I intend to stay here. Right here and beyond.
AUGUST 26, 1941
[...] I want to do so much. The one moment of discouragement and doubt comes before all one’s things are put away again, when one sees all the old books and thinks that one has read them all and how little one knows anyway, when one sees unfinished manuscripts and thinks of the labors ahead. I am aiming higher than ever before. God or something give me courage, and power!
1/22/42
Able to think only when I have a background, of music, of voices, of lecturing, able to think creatively only in the unconcious, losing the thread when I realize I am following a thread, much addicted to cigarettes and alcohol; shy about emotions of any kind and disturbed at their display; caricaturing my own talents as they lie now, writing facetious (and rather good) doggerel, sketches and perhaps whole books, specializing in takeoffs and pure whimsy and fantasy; highly critical of people, but with a circle of friends as wide as the Tropic of Cancer; subsisting mainly on fruit of citrus nature: rarely going in a church door except to hear Bach or Händel; fond of 18th century literature and music; dabbling in water color and stabbing at sculpture; aiming high and believing myself capable of great things. Falling in love more and more easily and “irrevocably.” Happier still when most alone.
FEBRUARY 6, 1942
Dinner with Hauser, we cooked, haphazardly, and started from scratch. Plenty of liquor. But no magic—no thrill, no beauty—no imagination, no ecstatic present, now perfect in the lift of a glass or a cigarette as I felt with Rosalind! I merely sit there, thinking of what to say next, stuffing my face and pondering on the personal spiel of certain people. He is all very well. I understand him and really like him—but he is as common to me as my bathmat.
2/11/42
Mozart concertos! Aged sixteen in my room at One Bank Street, with the door closed. The piano sings alone, and I lay down my books and close my eyes. One phrase in the slow second movement, with gentle fingertips, touches me like a kiss—I had not noticed the double notes, the dancing phrase in thirds, and it is a revelation—just as a kiss is a revelation from one we have known before, but whose kiss is the new unknown. At sixteen, I lay and asked myself could there be anything ever in the world so wonderfully beautiful, so perfect, as this Mozart concerto? And the answer was, no, not really—only someone might somehow be a concerto.