4/2/41

Lately I have been wasting time. I have been doing what I should have regarded with the utmost contempt at the age of sixteen. But it has done this for me: It has shown me that an unbookish life can be very useless. It has also shown me how what I have absorbed during my monastic adolescence can be used in a more normal life. And strangely it has made the books more important in one sense: that they are essential not for culture—or background—or scholarship—but to enrich the normal life. These sound like platitudes—at the most, truisms. But it has meant more to me than that, this discovery. I have seen and lived in the real world for the first time in my stupid life.