Between pleasure trips, my part-time business affairs were rolling along like clockwork. My large amounts of free time were devoted to reading whole swaths of literature. My reflections on the world around me and on life, a long time ripening, were beginning to congeal and produce decent fruit. Here are some pieces of it.
“July 3rd, 1985: I’ve noticed that when I attempt to write with my little stock of Latin, I easily stray from my point and can sustain no clear direction. This tells me many things. Unless we have a fairly complete command of language, not only does our clarity suffer as we try to express our thoughts but our own internal dialogue (better known as ‘thinking’) is equally lame and stuttering. Our reasoning and logic strays and trips without exact words to guide it. A good command of language, fluent and comprehensive, is not just an aid but the entire groundwork of good, clear thinking. How well a person can reason is exactly proportional to his verbal ability. Thought suffers continuous restrictions and injury from the limits of our vocabulary.
“Thus reading dictionaries is the quickest way to improve our minds. Knowing the original sense of a word, its origin (in Latin or German) and then its history, derivative uses and synonyms, is essential to clear thought. The brightness of all impressions is dependent on the brightness of the words we use to capture them. The less distinct the words are to us, the foggier the picture. Thus we cannot know a few words well and others but dimly. They come in troops all connected and compact. We understand each better by its roots, its family, history and personality.
“I wonder how frustrated, poor and uneducated people must feel a hundred times a day, when they can’t mentally process what happens in their life. I hear a poor, black man say “fuck” to a thousand situations, all different, because that’s all he can express. And it’s not a happy summation of the problem. It’s no resolution at all. It’s a quagmire of hopelessness.
“All pleasures depends on one’s mental dexterity in savoring them and can be kneaded out like dough from the slightest experiences into a life-sustaining bread. My pleasures are caught in a net that words have woven. The larger this language net grows, the more I catch.
“You can even view a wasteland under the bright sun of your word-rich intellect and delight yourself in the description of it. You can make it a vivid wasteland, Babylonian.
“That I can write a journal at all says everything. Most lives are so dismal and illiterate no attempt is even thought of. You have to possess some lucky parts and have the ambition and prospects of improving them. It’s an optimistic endeavor. Some journals trudge on into one long, sick decrepitude, cycling and repeating habits they can’t escape, portraying a limited, losing, existence, like a person slowly drowning. They start out with youth and optimism. They end, (like the Goncourt brothers) in pettiness and squabbling.
“Monday Aug. 19th, 1985: Last night I took a stroll with Lindsey up the ave. Then the Plough and many beers, the place hoping. Stared a lot. Thoughts on the tyranny of the female face, how much sway it has over me, regardless of the contempt I have for her wretched soul, and myself. I thought of courting solitude awhile, to escape this tyranny. Then I got sodden with beer and we danced.
“Talking to Martin yesterday about the English language as the richest and best in the world and slowly drawing everyone into its net, I expressed the notion that it still improves, that new writers add dimensions to it. One only has to read European history to see its wealth, everyday richer. So we may be spoiled children by it, a bit stifled and scared of the responsibility of wielding it. Some have gone off the deep end, poets and novelists, contorting it so much they seem to be trying to escape it."
