Sunday, July 18, 2010
2 AM. Okay. Papa, I don’t know if it is worthwhile for us to continue the discussion I thought we might have about community, but I’m available if you wish to do so.
Of course I’m available. Haven’t we been setting you up?
It certainly seems so, often enough!
Thursday, July 15, 2010
1:20 AM. Got a little sleep but I’m wheezing again and my mind is active, so why not go to work? Last night I took the header notes I have put together, broke them up one per line, read them into excel, sorted first by date and then, another sort, by date within individual. It comes to 14 pages, through June. More than eight pages of the 14 are Hemingway. A lot of information, if I can organize it. Never was able to do it in The Sphere And The Hologram.
3:30 AM. Might as well try; can’t read well enough to go back to sleep anyway. Who do I talk to? Papa?
Sure, why not?
Shall we continue with the questions I have accumulated so far? What about Agnes? How did you feel, all the way down, when you got that Dear John letter? [Agnes and he fell in love when he was her patient after he had been wounded in Italy in July 1918. He went home to America in January 1919, thinking that he and she would be married as soon as he could support them, but a few months later she wrote him, breaking off the engagement, redefining their love affair as kid stuff, more or less.] Obviously you were angry and hurt — but was that all? You weren’t 20 yet. Was there also some relief mixed in?
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
7:30 AM. I wake up, Papa, thinking about you and the Communists (having still been reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, of course). Is that what you want us to talk about next? If not, where would you like to go?
Do you really want an abstract disquisition about politics and government?
More, I’d like something on you and government.
You know my views. Government is a form of necessary protection racket. They have the ability to make you pay, and make you do things, and they use it as much as they dare. You have to have it, I’m not saying you don’t, because if you don’t have one protection racket, you’re going to have another one — but you don’t have to like it, and you certainly don’t have to see it as anything but what is. I mean, you don’t have to put a lot of hopes on it.