5/7/52

With these serious people, these bons vivants, who take so much more seriously their amusements, their aesthetic surroundings, than any artist takes his work or his creative process, the creative process begins to atrophy in their presence, for the curious reason that their pursuit of pleasure is so business like. And once they have it—pleasant café-bars, shopping-centers, an efficient maid, a garden, sunlight, then life, instead of relaxing, becomes shopping, getting repairs done, planning, anxiously, next summer’s vacation: in short, the element of pleasing, of amusement, goes out of the artist companion, and he can no longer find his proper plane. Amusement, entertainment, via writing, disappears in a fantastic world somewhere far away. As is usual, the paradox in this fascinates me.