Semaine de Noël, 1924:
The people who say they “read nothing but the best” are not, as some people call them, snobs. They are fools. The battle of the Spirit is not to read and to know the best—it is to find it—The thing that has caused me so much toil and trouble has come from a deep-rooted mistrust in me of all cultured authority. I hunger for the treasure that I fancy lies buried in a million forgotten books, and yet my reason tells me that the treasure that lies buried there is so small that it is not worth the pain of disinterment.
And yet nearly everything in the world of books that has touched my life most deeply has come from authority. I have not always agreed with authority that all the books called great are great, but nearly all the books that have seemed great to me have come from among this number.
I have not discovered for myself any obscure writer who is as great a novelist as Dostoievsky, nor any obscure poet with the genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
But I have mentioned Coleridge, and although my use of his name will not, I believe, cause any protest, it may cause surprise. Why not Shelley, or Spenser, or Milton?—It is here that my war with Authority—to which I owe everything—begins again.
There are in the world of my spirit certain gigantic figures who, although great as well in the world of authority, are yet overshadowed, and in some places, loom as enormous half-ghosts—hovering upon the cloudy borderland between obscurity and living remembrance.
Such a man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. To me, he is not one of the great English poets. He is The Poet. To me he has not to make obeisance at the throne of any other monarch—he is there by Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser.
At La Régence: Remembering the prostitute with rotten teeth that I talked to last night on Rue Lafayette:
My dirt is not as dirty as your dirt. My cleanness is cleaner than your cleanness.
If I have a hole in my sock that is cunning.
If you have a hole in your stocking love flies out of the window. Why are we like this? Boredom is the bedfellow of all the Latin peoples—the English, in spite of the phrase “bored Englishman,” are not bored.
