Writer's Diary
7/25/26
The light this July feels a little different, a little cooler, a little bit more like autumn. For no particular reason, I guess.
There are too many half-finished books in my apartment, and I’ve been neglectful, not really tapped into some things I need to be tapped into.
The letters of Archibald MacLeish and letters between Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell for instance—two books I’ve had for years but for whatever reason haven’t read yet. I used to really love reading letters and diaries, but I’ve dropped off, maybe because these reminders and flourishes from the old world of letters feel painfully far away.
I owe a few people letters, so I have to do that this week.
Archibald MacLeish, the American poet of Scottish descent, writes in 1918, when America’s involvement in World War I is at peak, “But after all, what matters it all, at all? We know that the world liveth, and that we are the life of the world, and that such labor as we do, such beauty as we speak, such divinity as we perceive, enter into the life of the world, and we know that certain things there are which must do for the yea-saying of our hearts, and if we do those things which are necessary for us to do, which we must do, then who are we to question, and what coin shall we be paid? Surely the great stream of human life shall go on, and we in it by the beauty of which we have uttered, and by the labor which we have done. When I think of the generations of the dead who loved and desired and hoped, and all for naught, and are forgotten and their bones dust, then I feel a certain great joy, such as a leaf must feel in the swift water, that I am driven in this flood, and I am nothing but only the work of my hands, and the thought of my brain has meaning and intent and end, for surely this tide of life has somewhere its ending as the tide of love has ending in white arms and hair thrown wind-wise to the night, and a breast like summer’s dusk for softness and swift peace. Now it struggles against itself, stung somehow by the poison of old time, and why it struggles or whither no man knows, but only that out of the pain fire cometh.”
I wonder, incidentally, how young writers know that they’re writers without writing letters, because letters and diaries are the training ground, the laboratory.1
—a craving for something of importance outside the self, and at the same time something that’s not a cause or some grand movement to gratify the ego through joining; something small; something to tend to.
We’re unbelievably unimportant on our own. We’re also unbelievably unimportant bound up into groups and social media networks. We’re important as individuals in relation to each other.
Another thought reading MacLeish’s letters. I’m still in the early part of the book, so he’s still young, it’s 1920 now, and he’s commenting to a friend about the world of the Victorians. “Florence Nightingale was alive ten years ago,” he writes. The Victorians believed in God, duty. They had extraordinarily big families. Then poof. All gone, totally destroyed.
I think there’s definitely an analogy to the last twenty years, where the world that came before was not destroyed so much by war but by technology and acquiescence and lethargy (though a little bit by war, too).
MacLeish’s brother, Kenny, was killed in the First World War. In many of the early letters, he’s trying to console his mother even several years later, and at the same time he’s trying to build his life as a writer, begging his old professor for a job at Yale, writing for The New Republic and The Yale Review.
He writes about how home prices have risen and rents have risen since the war, making everything unaffordable. His world seems in some ways like ours, in other ways incredibly small and manageable. Relationships and relations are not abstract. Places and people are not lashed together in a single chattering cortex.
Though I’m sure I embarrass myself now, I would have embarrassed myself much more if I had graduated from college and started a Substack. God knows I would have tried.