[...] Once I remember I had a girl friend and she had a steady boy friend and I used to fall into a thing with the two of them on a Saturday night when Collie was off at one of his big movie parties, and I know you won’t believe it, I don’t want to remind you of Don Beda, but it was very different with those friends because I would feel all right the next day and the three of us liked each other like good friends and I almost never felt low-down about it. I mean as an example it used to be almost as much fun eating breakfast on Sunday as it was the night before, but that’s because we kept it uncomplicated and the girl liked me very much and nobody was asking anybody else to solve their whole life for them. But that’s what you were asking me and what I was asking you and I resented it just as much as you did. [...]

So with the grace of a cow kicking flop, and with the old private worry that perhaps I had taken a punch too many on the head and would never be able to think that well after all, I stumbled into the kind of things which everybody has wrestled with, one way and then another; I thought of courage and of cowardice, and how we are all brave and all terrified each in our own way and our private changing proportion, and I thought of honesty and deception, and the dance of life they make, for it is exactly when we come closest to another that we are turned away with a lie, and blunder forward on a misconception, moving to understand ourselves on the platitudes and lies of the past. And, vaguely, thinking of certain words not as words but as the serious divisions of my experience, and every man’s experience is serious to himself, I thought of such couples as love and hate, and victory and defeat, and what it was to feel warm and what it was to be cool. I explored with humility and early arrogance, lying on that lumpy bed, reduced to heat rash and to panic, knowing I was weak and wondering if I would ever be strong. For I touched the bottom myself, there was a bottom that time. I returned to it, I wallowed in it, I looked at myself, and the longer I looked the less terrifying it became and the more understandable. I began then to make those first painful efforts to acquire the most elusive habit of all, the mind of the writer, and though I could hardly judge from my early pages whether I were a talent or a fool, I continued, I went on for a little while, until I ended with an idea that many men have had, and many will have again—and indeed I started with that idea—but I knew that finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn for we can hardly believe what we are told, we can only measure what has happened inside ourselves. So I wrote a few poor pages and gave them up and knew I would try again.

And he nodded, his heart numb, his will sick, thinking there must be some escape, and knowing there was nothing. For on the instant she said these words he heard the other words she had said the night he gave his qualified proposal of marriage. “You have no respect for me,” she had said then, and like a beggar to the beggar of his own pride, he knew that he could not refuse her. All the while he held Elena he felt cold as stone, but he knew that he would marry her, that he could not give her up for there was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. If he did not marry her he could never forget that he had once made her happy and now she had nothing but her hospital bed.

[...] For years afterward I thought of writing Eitel a letter but I could not decide exactly what to say and the impulse passed. I felt that I had moved my distance, and it would have been self-righteous to tell him so. The years pass into the years and we count our time in lonely private rhythms which have little to do with number or judgment or the uncertain shifting memory of friends.

I found as I continued to study, that there was an order in what I sought, and I read each book as a curve in some unconscious spiral of intellectual pursuit until the most difficult text at the proper moment was open, and yet the more I learned the more confident I became, because no matter the reputation of the author and the dimensions of his mind, I knew as I read that not one of them could begin to be a final authority for me, because finally the crystallization of their experience did not have a texture apposite to my experience, and I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. So I continued to write, and as I worked, I learned the taste of a failure over and over again, for the longest individual journey may well be the path from the first creative enthusiasm to the concluded artifact. There were nights in the library when I would look at the footnotes in some heroically constructed tome, and know that the spirit of the rigorous scholar who had written it must know its regret, for each footnote is a step onto deeper meaning which terrifies the order of progression of the scholar’s logic, until there is no point in experience, nor any word, from which one cannot set out to explore the totality of the All, if indeed there be an All and not an expanding mystery.

He held her to him, and fondled her hair, feeling a sense of protection which bid her to stop here and ask no more; for of all the distance she had come, and he had helped her to move, and there were times like this when he felt the substance of his pride to depend upon exactly her improvement as if she were finally the only human creation in which he had taken part, he still knew that he could help her no longer, nor could anyone else, for she had come now into that domain where her problems were everyone’s problems and there were no answers and no doctors, but only that high plateau where philosophy lives with despair. He felt a portent in himself that she would grow away from him, and in years to come, many years to be sure, it might be that he would need her, and would she be forced to stay out of kindness and loyalty and boredom too?

“One cannot look for a good time, Sergius,” he whispered in his mind to me, thinking of how I first had come to Desert D’Or, “for pleasure must end as love or cruelty”—and almost as an afterthought, he added—“or obligation.” In that way, Eitel thought of me, and with a kindly sadness he wondered, “Sergius, what does one ever do with one’s life?” asking in the easy friendship of memory, “Are you one of those who know?”