“I feel slightly defeated…”

“I feel slightly defeated and unclean, as if I hadn’t had a bath in a long while. I read three books last Thursday for the express purpose of forgetting things around me for a while. Naturally the books were short. Wilder’s ‘Our Town’, Millay’s ‘Fatal Interview’, which I had read before, and ‘A Book of Hours’ by Culrose Peattie. But they didn’t help me very much.”

- January 14, 1940 to Leon Radway