And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I had to get to Denver at once.
At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who’s lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.
I want a blaze of light to flame in me forever in a timeless, dear love of everything. And why should I pretend to want anything else?
Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.
I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.
All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh.
I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference.
The cause of the world’s woe is birth, the cure of the world’s woe is a bent stick.
The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.
But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?
Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I’ll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth.
What difference does it make after all? – anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.
And then we’ll all go off to sweet life, ’cause now is the time and we all know time!
She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.
Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.
It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.
For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.
That’s the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.
Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.
We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess – across the night...