War is being declared tomorrow here so perhaps you can understand that I have been working under difficulties, but difficulties negligible compared with what others have to go through.
Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! . . . It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water.
Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.
I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.
