So here I am in Denver. City of lights. Rural paradise. The world's own most fashionable quay. But pretensions aside.

A hard thing to say. I am going back to Reed next year. I am living at Reed next year. My life, my proposed propositions, canceled like that, in a flash, in an instant, signatures on a piece of paper, drops of blood, even the lightning movements of neural impulse are invalid. Still to God I turn my love. I shall go where I am wanted. What needs to be done will be done.

Now I'm not saying I neccessarily believe in fate, but I'm not saying that I neccessarily don't. There are advantages and disadvantages to believing in it. It isn't something that you can just jump into, I don't think; the difficulties must be studied, it must be understood. But can't I control, force, bend, push, mold the actions of life to my own advantage and guiding line? Emerson would say that my own personality is the source of constant change, that my genius will produce all unknown quantities and cast my life in the pattern of my shadow. Plato would ask us to look beyond. But I suppose we look away from the world. Not as if it were a glaring light, but rather to a glaring light. The world is insignificant, a little rock, a little moldy piece of clay. Sitting in the cold and darkness.

But it flourishes with life. I took a walk today. We must remember to stop and look at the flowers. JD and Nick were playing and are playing I'm sure endlessly with flowers all of this week and the last (will be and have). It has reminded me of the flowers. Reds that look wilted from afar reveal new streams of freshness up close, clothed again in the vivacity of all daring beauty. Life is daring, youth must be daring, for it is beauty that is doomed to die. I will not accept that my youth is something to though be cherished like some precious liquid dripping from the cracks between my fingertips. If it falls on the ground, it will stain my hands, the stain of fresh blood that not all the perfumes of Arabie can best and that not all the seas, the oceans, the pouring tumults of time can wash away. A whole generation is living with us, history is living with us, the oracles walk among us uttering the cross and monstrance from their lips, their motions, glowing eyes.

So I flourish here in beauty. It is not always easy -- beauty will not always reveal itself, in sometimes subtle ways rather than, clearly. The forms of the passionate flower rising to bursting in the fruits of the sun are no less wondrous than the dark lichens that crisscross in hebrew letters upon a fountain of aged moss in the cobwebs and darkness; and even cobwebs, that bespeak age, are they not the rebirth of life from muck? For the spider takes the fly, that most lowly and disgusting of creatures, at least to my mind, and changes it, transforms it, into the beautiful patterns of a web. A web that has evolved to catch the fly. And so is not the fly the muck of beauty in its own making? Ugliness is beauty in its purest form. Revulsion gives eternal birth to love.

It was strange to see my old teachers again today. When I enter that school, I feel trapped. I began to think in my mind, "Will I be happy? I will. I must be. But it is so hard. I have only to choose to be happy..." and on the game went like a tapering flame; but even in the midst of adverse circumstances it seems to me that sometimes the I, the inner sight and vision, that Celtic genius of calling the thing by its true name, still is unaffected by the bitter juice of roots and acrid, lives in its own life, sits in contemplation on the eternal throne of repose. Still, being there reminds me of who I was, and who I was is something I seek to escape. Therein lies my folly, hence my madness. Away. I shall return.

So life unwinds. All plans come apart. Symbolism takes on no and new meanings. Everything is failure. I am dust and decay. But I will not consign myself. I choose to be happy, even in the midst of adverse things. There is something to me that cannot be sorrow, and there is no sorrow that I should not derive into a joy. I declare that even in the pithy sadness of living there is an immensity to be gained.