It was a fearful blow to get no letters yesterday again. I shall never understand it. When L. M. came back after the last chance, I hid for a moment or two upstairs, just to delay the “No letters—nothing.” Perhaps my luck will turn to-day and the sea have a pearl.

Such a night! Immense wind and sea and cold. This is certainly no ‘pensive citadel.’ This morning the storm still rages. It's a blow. I long to go out and have a walk, but I daren't face the wind.

What is this about the novel? Tell me, thou little eye among the blind. (It's easy to see who my bedfellow has been.) But seriously, the more I read the more I feel all these novels will not do. After them I'm a swollen sheep looking up who is not fed. And yet I feel one can lay down no rules. It's not in the least a question of material or style or plot. I can only think in terms like “a change of heart.” I can't imagine how after the war these men can pick up the old threads as though it had never been. Speaking to you I'd say we have died and live again. How page 288 can that be the same life? It doesn't mean that life is the less precious or that ‘the common things of light and day’ are gone. They are not gone, they are intensified, they are illumined. Now we know ourselves for what we are. In a way it's a tragic knowledge: it's as though, even while we live again, we face death. But through Life: that's the point. We see death in life as we see death in a flower that is fresh unfolded. Our hymn is to the flower's beauty: we would make that beauty immortal because we know. Do you feel like this—or otherwise—or how?

But, of course, you don't imagine I mean by this knowledge let-us-eat-and-drink-ism. No, I mean ‘deserts of vast eternity.’ But the difference is (perhaps I'm wrong) I couldn't tell anybody bang out about those deserts: they are my secret. I might write about a boy eating strawberries or a woman combing her hair on a windy morning, and that is the only way I can ever mention them. But they must be there. Nothing less will do. They can advance and retreat, curtsey, caper to the most delicate airs they like, but I am bored to Hell by it all.

Here is the sun. I'll get up. My knees are cold, and my feet swim between the sheets like fishes….