The people whom we read as we read Shakespeare are part of our daily lives. I mean it doesn't seem to me Queer to be thinking about Othello at bregchick or to page 113 be wondering about the Phoenix and the Turtle in my bath. It's all part of a whole. Just as that vineyard below me is the vineyard in the Song of Solomon, and that beautiful sound as the men hoe between the vines is almost part of my body, goes on in me. I shall never be the same as I was before I heard it, just as I'll never be the same as I was before I read the Death of Cleopatra. One has willingly given oneself to all these things—one is the result of them all. Are you now saying “intellectual detachment”? But I've allowed for that.

Other people—I mean people to-day—seem to look on in a way I don't understand. I don't want to boast. I don't feel at all arrogant, but I do feel they have not perhaps lived as fully as we have… However… Did you know that Turgenev's brain pesait deux mille grammes? Horrible idea! I couldn't help seeing it au beurre noir when I read that. I shall never forget that brain at Isola Bella. It was still warm from thinking. Ugh!

I shall be very, very glad to see you. I have a mass of things to talk about. ‘The great artist is he who exalts difficulty’—do you believe that? And that it's only the slave (using slave in our mystical sense) who pines for freedom. The free man, the artist, seeks to bind himself. No, these notes aren't any good. But I have been finding out more and more how true it is that it's only the difficult thing that is worth doing; it's the difficult thing that one deliberately chooses to do. I don't think Tchehov was as aware of that as he should have been. Some of the stories in The Horse-Stealers are—rather a shock.

Tell me, (I've changed my pen and my sujet) how is this? There is no Saint Galmier here, only Eau de Montreux, which according to the bottle, is saturated with carbonic acid gas. But my physiology book said that carbonic acid gas was a deadly poison: we only breathed it out, but never, except at the last desperate moment, took it in. And here are Doctors Schnepsli, Rittchen and Knechloo saying it's a sovereign cure for gravel. It is all so very difficult, as Constantia would say.

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Don't walk on both sides of the street at once. It distracts people and makes it difficult for them to continue the conversation.