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he’s angry and alive and that’s pretty rare these days.
I think it’s horrible to scare people about life merely because they are female and have the emotional make-up – in certain respects – of males, or what males supposedly have.
And it is essential to me that I say, You have gifts which it is your duty to use; you have an imagination which is your own and through it you must find new ways to live and you must be courageous enough to live these ways.
There comes a time when one can no longer carry in one’s brain, heavily, certain memories, certain aspects of the present. I did that once before: I wrote out of myself a lot of destruction. My father once said: blondes only work under compulsion. It must be true. I know what hell it is to write. I know how everything goes to pieces under the strain of it, the fear of not finishing or finishing badly. It never stops and there is never a moment – until the thing is out of one’s hands into alien hands – that is really rest.
I am 25 which is not old if one has done something but is not the beginning if one’s hands are empty. I have at this moment no name: I am called one thing and recognized unwillingly as such: but my passport says something else.
I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one. I feel, after the waste and nervousness of too many months, a kind of order coming back into my spirit.
He tells me what is wrong with me now is that I’ve worried too much and gotten the whole thing dark in my mind, and says the thing to do is simply write it and be brave enough to cancel it out if it’s no good.
It seems silly to be so frantic over one little idea, one little book, one little life, when things are blowing up so badly everywhere.
It will work out the same way: the young men will die, the best ones will die first, and the old powerful men will survive to mishandle the peace.
