From a certain spirit of system, however, from a certain love of art and contrivance, we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end, and to be eager to promote the happiness of our fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense or feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy.

11/21/19

“During the three-hour siestas and on weekends I mostly sat inside, reading books and writing letters. I treated my books like people, complaining about which ones I brought with me: “Mavis Gallant was a mistake,” I wrote in a letter. “So was Henry James. Mark Twain was a brilliant idea.” I read more hours than I worked at the radio station—Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (for the fifth time), Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, and James Baldwin’s Evidence of Things Not Seen. My letters were full of quotations from these books that said what I could not: “My memory stammers: but my soul is a witness,” Baldwin wrote. And from Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs: “I don’t want to write any more letters. What’s the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I am changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am someone else, it’s obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can’t possibly write to strangers.”
“Well, he’s right,” I wrote to a friend. “But me, I can’t stop talking to paper. Kisses, darling.

11/01/19