8/18/53

It is curious that in the most interesting periods of one’s life, one never writes one’s diary. There are some things that even a writer cannot put down in words (at the time). He shrinks from putting them down. And what a loss! Like a lot of outrageous, apparently senseless losses in nature, due to an assumed superabundance in nature. Even experience is superabundant, but it is at times more difficult to ferret out—that is, in dull times—than in more dramatic times. But the value of diaries is their dramatic periods, when one has “perhaps” shrunk from setting down the weakness, the vagaries, the changes of mind, the cowardices, the shameful hatreds, the little lies carried out or not, which form one’s true character.