I'm Afraid I Did Not Pray Hard

Life Is Good, After All...and That's What Stays With Me, Even Now, Even When I'm About To Be Packed Off To Poland.

After Each Creative Act One Has To Be Sustained By One's Strength Of Character, By A Moral Sense, By I Don't Know What, Lest One Tumble.

Greed Probably Figures In My Intellectual Life As Well, As I Attempt To Absorb A Massive Amount Of Information With Consequent Mental Indigestion.

Slowly But Surely I Have Been Soaking Rilke Up These Last Few Months: The Man, His Work And His Life. And That Is Probably The Only Right Way With Literature, With Study, With People Or With Anything Else: To Let It All Soak In, To Let It All Mature Slowly Inside You Until It Has Become A Part Of Yourself. That, Too, Is A Growing Process. Everything Is A Growing Process. And In Between, Emotions And Sensations That Strike You Like Lightning. But Still The Most Important Thing Is The Organic Process Of Growing.

We Human Beings Cause Monstrous Conditions, But Precisely Because We Cause Them We Soon Learn To Adapt Ourselves To Them. Only If We Become Such That We Can No Longer Adapt Ourselves, Only If, Deep Inside, We Rebel Against Every Kind Of Evil, Will We Be Able To Put A Stop To It. ... While Everything Within Us Does Not Yet Scream Out In Protest, So Long Will We Find Ways Of Adapting Ourselves, And The Horrors Will Continue.