9/21/54

Oh, the imaginative, the too imaginative men, who are always in love, but never requited, only noticed, boasted, their flowers and dedications received! Like Beethoven, Gide perhaps, Goethe, all the impulsive ones, who instinctively want to hitch the tail of their rocket onto something that remains on earth, before they take off into pure space. Such people cannot live without being constantly in love. Requited or not doesn’t matter. It is a sine qua non of their creativity, their happiness of course, and their existence.

I lay with her looking at the stars. I am extremely conscious of the stars, the fact that the Great Dipper, perceived by the Chinese, is flying apart at a fantastic rate, and still, at the time of my death, will be seen to be no further scattered than it is today. Well, with her, it didn’t matter, I knew that she, and I, would be dead, or near it, in another thirty years or less. It didn’t matter, because I had discovered something with her that I had never known before. It was like a secret, a secret of living. It was peace. It was something at the core, beyond life and death, living and dying. It was something happy, because it was true and eternal, even more eternal than those stars. I hope I can be excused for saying more eternal, since we human beings cannot entirely understand the word eternal, anyway. With her, I was suffused with more beauty than I could discover on any trips to Greece or to the Louvre. With her, I knew more pleasure (which is happiness) than I should ever know with Plato, Sappho, Aristotle, or Alfred Whitehead. (Plato! All you say I should have. I had!) Her body between my hands! Her lips accessible turned to me. And that sadness waiting, Ovid, when we were done.