11/11/46

Pain sends one wandering into the dusk, the dusk of New York. It is all at once all sadness, all beauty, the soft blue gray of the air (and the gray will win), the yellow white red green lights that hang on the blue grayness like ornaments upon a Christmas tree. For it is near Christmas. Christmas, and the one we love! But she will not be with us. She has never been with us for Christmas and will never be. She is gone, she is dead, and all you have of her are the memories bound up in yourself that you carry on and on through the dusk. All at once this terrible sadness, inarticulate in the terrible beauty of dusk! Sadness so strange and beautiful and perfectly pure itself, it almost produces a kind of happiness. Where shall I not wander in the years to come? Through so many more dusks, beloved!