and Louvre—Something over-rich and bloody about it.—Note how French love to paint blood (Delacroix)—then along Seine bookstalls—found only junk—then to Lipp’s for beer and cervelas—then back to hotel where worked from 6.30-10.30—Then out to eat at Taverne Royale—Walk back through Vendôme and Rue St. Honoré—Read a little and worked from one to 3.00—6 hours today.
Sunday Night: I feel low—discouraged by the mass of things again tonight. I must make some decisive action—the new web of streets behind the dome has depressed me.
The mind grows weary with such a problem as mine, by constantly retracing his steps, by constantly feeling around the same cylinder from which there seems at present to be no escape.
The European temper is one that has learned control—that is, it has learned indifference—Each man writes his own book without worrying very much about what the other has written—he reads little or if he reads much, it is only a trifle—a spoonful of the ocean of print that inundates everything—Picture Anatole France—with a reputation for omniscience—picking daintily here and there among the bookstalls of the Seine. To go by them affects me with horror and weariness—as it does Paul Valéry—but I lack his power to resist. I must go by there—and if I do again and again I cannot keep away from them.
More and more I am convinced that to be a great writer a man must be something of an ass. I read of Tolstoi that he read no newspapers, that he went away and lived among peasants for 7 years at a time, and that for six years he read nothing except the novels of Dumas. Yet such a man could write great books. I almost think it is because of this that he did.
Bernard Shaw, one of our prophets at the present time, is worshipped past idolatry by many people who consider that he knows everything or practically everything.
From what I have been able to discover of his reading from his writing, I can be sure that he has read Shakespeare—not very carefully, Ibsen very carefully, a book by Karl Marx, which made a deep impression on him,
