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, miraculous power of women throughout the ages! “You take care of it for me!” said the boy. “I will!” as they parted. I followed the girl to her home two blocks away, half trotting over the snow and slush to keep up with her. I almost spoke to her. I loved the sense of fiction in the scene. I should not have remembered very well if I had heard this in soberness. My sodden brain supplied the mood, the style, the atmosphere and the tones unplayed above and below, the multitudinous sketch lines which a writer might have put in before and after, some of which he would have left unsaid, like those I imagined I was seeing and experiencing. Drinking is a fine imitation of the artistic process. The brain jumps directly to that which it seeks always: truth, and the answer to the question, what are we, and what caverns of thought and passion and sensation can we not attain? There is therefore something of the artist in every drunkard and I say God bless them all. The proportion of men drunks to the smaller number of women drunks is parallel to that of the men artists to the women. And perhaps there is something homosexual about the women drunks too: they care not for their appearance, and they have definitely learned to play.