Finished and full paper journal #34.
“At the Public Library at Forty-second Street I saw the room of manuscripts. It looked like a jail cell. It was locked, and not only locked but it had a heavy iron-grille door like that of a prison. It was more terrible to me, this burying of manuscripts, than the burial of a body in the earth. Perhaps because I have been tormented by the ethical conflict of the diary. Should I destroy it for the sake of human beings it might wound, or keep it because it has value for human beings. I received my life from books. So I would be killing a life-giving creation, to save a few from the truth. But who saved me from the truth? No one ever spared me that. The world needs the truth. No matter how painful. Because when people bury the truth it festers. The grilled, locked room of the Public Library is also the tomb in which we lock the dangerous truths.
I cannot imagine my diaries there. Read in gloom and darkness, not in the sun and by the sea.”
- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume Five 1947-1955
I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-or, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
So it goes.
Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.
- Sylvia Plath, 1954, from ‘Letters Home’