Staff

You must learn to take other people less uncritically and yourself more uncritically. You are all eaten up by the inroads of your own conscience.

I suppose it boils downs to this: you want to be a famous man and a great writer, and yet you want to lead an obscure, simple, and plain kind of life like other men.

I’m about ready not only to stop writing but to jump off a bridge. The canoe is in the middle of the rapids and I dont even wanta row . . . when you cant even buy yourself a beer what’s on the other shore?

I am miserable now—not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me—resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me,—the tenderness I never had. I don’t want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever.

I don’t think such rubbish has ever been published in The Contemporary before—and not only The Contemporary—not in Russian or in any other language, I would think. Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but that was my impression. It’s like The Staff of Righteousness, only the language is worse. I wanted to laugh, only it hurt, like laughing at a close relative.

My life in bed for the last twelve years is indeed too sad for me to regret losing it.

This is rather a crazy letter in some respects, I apprehend.