So with the grace of a cow kicking flop, and with the old private worry that perhaps I had taken a punch too many on the head and would never be able to think that well after all, I stumbled into the kind of things which everybody has wrestled with, one way and then another; I thought of courage and of cowardice, and how we are all brave and all terrified each in our own way and our private changing proportion, and I thought of honesty and deception, and the dance of life they make, for it is exactly when we come closest to another that we are turned away with a lie, and blunder forward on a misconception, moving to understand ourselves on the platitudes and lies of the past. And, vaguely, thinking of certain words not as words but as the serious divisions of my experience, and every man’s experience is serious to himself, I thought of such couples as love and hate, and victory and defeat, and what it was to feel warm and what it was to be cool. I explored with humility and early arrogance, lying on that lumpy bed, reduced to heat rash and to panic, knowing I was weak and wondering if I would ever be strong. For I touched the bottom myself, there was a bottom that time. I returned to it, I wallowed in it, I looked at myself, and the longer I looked the less terrifying it became and the more understandable. I began then to make those first painful efforts to acquire the most elusive habit of all, the mind of the writer, and though I could hardly judge from my early pages whether I were a talent or a fool, I continued, I went on for a little while, until I ended with an idea that many men have had, and many will have again—and indeed I started with that idea—but I knew that finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn for we can hardly believe what we are told, we can only measure what has happened inside ourselves. So I wrote a few poor pages and gave them up and knew I would try again.