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#67 Friday 8 December 7 pm My darling- No mail in so long - or perhaps rather so little in the past couple of weeks, and so irregularly…I have received all thru #68, and also #70-74 (the last dated Sunday Nov. 26) Sweetie, there'll be no bill on our last phone call from Hawaii - I paid for it at the time. Sorry, I thought you knew that. I guess that puts you 15.60 ahead, instead of just 60 (Don't spend it on Christmas!) Incidentally, I think you’re doing very well and I hope there are no unanticipated expenses to spoil it. Thanks for sending the bank statement rechecks, which I'm returning (with very small present enclosed) at this time. I've just read the letter of explanation accompanying the shipment claim forms and will try to get around to filling them out tomorrow. If you were just here for awhile what a pleasant place this would be! You’d probably enjoy seeing the boisterous, apparently amusing play the Koreans are putting on right now a hundred feet or so from this office. (It's the same one I saw a preview of the other night; this time it's a dress rehearsal, with just the military - plus anyone who can squeeze under the canvas without being caught by the cops - as audience. Judging from the laughs and applause it's a fair success). And I know you’d enjoy walking down the road any morning and seeing all the kids - up to two they don't wear anything. From two to four they wear blouses (boys and girls alike) which reach down just below their belly buttons. From four to six (all ages approximate) the little boys wear [pg 2] pants with no seats in them - not a bad idea. There are a thousand and one things here that would interest you, and they’d interest me a lot more than they do now if I could laugh about them or learn from them with you. Glad to get the clipping about the bombing of Tokyo. Sort of wished you had sent the map of the city which was in the same edition - Reif, as well as the camp leaders, would be interested in it. Send more from time to time - I’d be interested to know, for instance, what they did (if anything) to Tokyo [CENSORED]. We'll get brief news of any bombings but no detailed reports. Except for scanning it when I received it, I haven't even begun the book on Russia yet but I do expect to very soon. And look forward to it. Just recently I've had another little spurt of busyness - and in general recovering my Japanese (which was actually down to about a third of what we covered at Boulder, though it comes back fairly easily) seems to keep me occupied. I told Evan congratulations for you and he was glad to hear from you - sends his regards back. Did I answer the question about Thorlaksson? Yes, I think he graduated with Chet, and his wife and children did stay in Boulder for awhile, but have since moved. Do send me copies of your stories soon, the one you are making up for Wendy and trying out on Keeo. I have been much interested in your remarks about Paula, as you've made them from time to time. It [pg 3] is a rather pathetic situation, isn't it? And at the same time, it probably does help you to keep your own sense of values and proportion. I'm glad, for instance, that we haven't a corresponding fear of the war, however much we both hate it…I don't mean just plain being afraid, but being afraid in the way that Bill evidently is: afraid of himself and unwilling or unable to grow up. Yes, darling, I think we have much to be grateful for. I understand and agree with the way you feel about Paula as a companion, and I wish more than anything that you could be around somebody like Jean May. I repeat, darling, be sure not to let inconvenience or any sentimental reason do more than postpone such an occasion as a day with Fran's mother - I do hope that comes about. Judging from your letters, the times when you feel lowest are just those when you haven't had any fresh stimulus in awhile, and you need that even more than I do right now. Saturday Dec. 9 7:30 am To go back to #68 for a moment - the one in which you were feeling especially low- Darling, I felt wretched for a couple of days after receiving that letter, and I believed every word of it because I understood how you felt. It will be the same the next time you feel that way and write about it - as I want you to. But right now, at some days’ (and several happier letters’) remove from that mood, I know with simple objectivity that you’re not going to pieces, darling, and (to be continued this afternoon) [pg 4] that tough as it is to experience what you’re going through now from time to time is an easily explainable phenomenon. (If you happen to receive this letter at another period of feeling acutely unhappy it will probably make you either mad as hell, or feel as tho I'm letting you down-[?] don't read any further until the day after tomorrow). I can't altogether follow your injunction not to worry about it - that comes and goes, as your own surges of feeling do - but I will try to help. You must begin by realizing that, inevitably, something will die inside you just a little bit because of this separation. It is happening to you now, I think, and I am sorrier than I can say in words. You mustn't, darling, let yourself be cowed by the fact, nor count it a dead loss, because what you lose in luckiness and zest you gain in patience, understanding and heightened self-respect. And I know you too well to believe that you could ever really lose your zest - you have too abundant energy, too strong a love of life for that to happen. Something will die in you a little, but you'll be maturing on the whole. I know, darling, - it has happened to me in the past. It is a curious little paradox that when we were first married I wanted to speed up the process of your growing up and that now, simply out of circumstances, I am unable to slow it down (or help you to). That is what I meant in saying that I'm sorrier than I can easily express in words. You are so full of life, and I do so love you for it, that I no longer [pg 5] think of trying to subdue you. But it will even out later on. You'll see - it's truly amazing how quickly people can forget a period of strain like this one of ours and readjust themselves to rich and happy living. I see that going on, in a primitive way, all about me every day. (It is true, even so, that the more sensitive and intelligent civilians here, though they laugh and are even merry frequently, have that look of a deeper suffering in their eyes at certain moments) When I return it will make for an even more harmonious balance between us than we were achieving before I left; that simple and certain knowledge is one of my consolations in this forced severance. Why? Because you grow more capable all the time of understanding me (in a way such as to augment further the positive stimulus you are to me already), and at the same time grow more and more endearingly understandable to me. I say again, and truly, that I would not have you suffer pain for its own sake or have you undergo any painful experience for the sake of some empty ideal of “maturity” per se. The important thing is not managing one's emotions to achieve maturity, but rather growing sufficiently mature in response to objective situations to meet them with self respect and a heightened sense of personal identity and capacity for accomplishment. This is not an easy period for me, either, darling. [pg 6] I am still fighting my way back from that period of surrender and loss of initiative from which I had hardly more than begun to emerge when we first met. I am doing so under a double handicap (one of which you share with me - or perhaps, in some ways, both): I don't have you beside me to share problems and pleasures with, and I am in a position such that (the organization here being considerably overstaffed) I could get by with doing very little work at all. With all the urgent things already accomplished in my particular office, I have to decide what's worth doing both for its own sake and for the sake of learning from it, and I have to strike a balance too (once I get wound up on a job) between working and living. If you do find work to do here, it's hard to live - and I mean just seeking companionship, reading and relaxing. Making decisions in the field (as opposed to planning on paper) is hard for me. So is handling people with pulling my punches: that is, being decisive, but in a meaningful way and not just as an exercise of authority. I often think, with regard to a given situation, how much more forcefully (in proportion to energy spent on decisions) and naturally you would deal with it than I would. Perhaps in that sense it's good for me to be on my own just now, though I’d never maintain that that either was anymore than [pg 7] a very incidental and momentary positive byproduct of an essential negative experience (as far as we mutually are concerned). I might add, as an afterthought, that being decisive (and I mean, of course, unostentatiously so) is no problem to me in a period of stress when I am really worked up to doing something. The hard thing, for me, is being both relaxed and purposeful at the same time. I'm learning, if slowly - and just about everything I've learned in that connection came from you. In my early teens I built a tower of strength - or so I thought it was then - out of several categories of explicit and supply worded convictions: with these in neat and readily available packages I felt equipped to meet the world, and there was something of the conquering hero in that feeling; no project and no idea was too ambitious for me to consider in connection with myself. It was some years before I made the painful and [disturbing?] discovery that it was all on paper - to what I took for strength was a shortcut, and a blind which by and large prevented me from getting out and really learning anything. Perhaps I exaggerate, but it's true enough so that I had to start over on a very different a more humble basis 3 or 4 years ago. And while I almost never stop to think about it anymore, I'm half-aware in some brief instant or another nearly every day that I am still struggling to discard [pg 8] one or another false premise of a too prolonged adolescent philosophy, one or another little obscuring vanity in favor of some more real if humbler accomplishment. What has all this to do with you, sweetie? Well, I am aware that it could - if you let yourself take it that way - make you feel even more insecure by causing you to identify yourself with my weaknesses with which you are already familiar. (This whether you realize it or not - I know, because in the past you've had distinct reactions to them). I know that you love me deeply, my darling, and I do not detract from that by saying that you also idealize me a little. So do I you. It is good for both of us, I think, if we don't take it too seriously; I think you, I personally, because of our particular natures and the way we happened to grow up, both need and stand to grow somewhat more from love and companionship than the average - say the average civilized person. I am only suggesting that, as unsatisfactory a life as this is just now, I am not afraid of it. I have periods of desolation, feelings of personal adequacy which cause me to make foolish little mistakes - and yet throughout them now I realize I have developed the strength to spring back and don't let them bother me more than momentarily. Little humiliations - the kind of which other people are not aware, or even the kind of which they are - do not mar, as they once did, my essential self-respect. [pg 9] That's a big thing to say, in a time when I'm deprived in any direct sense of the most important and efficient counter to that feeling of inadequacy - love and understanding. Of course I understand how you feel, darling! I feel that way myself at times, despite my advantage of occupation. But I have you there [on the time?], even at such a remove as to furnish little immediate comfort, and I know increasingly what I am fighting for both inside me and around me. So I am suggesting too that you must for a moment really believe the defeatist language you have been using a little recently. Not worthy of me, darling-? Why, a third of me already is you; you had better take pains not to insult it, too! Afraid of being afraid…yes, I know that feeling, darling - it's one you can't compromise with. There are some feelings which you learn in time to laugh off, goodhumoredly; that one you fight until such a time (and it will come) as you can smile about it. Since you can't think clearly about it meanwhile (and I'm familiar with that phenomenon, too), you don't try to. You simply know, underneath, that it's not true that you’re going to pieces. For believe me, precious, it's not. I say that realizing that you will continue to relapse into a sort of painful fog now and then - I know it's hell, as you do; don't mistake it for something fatal. You'll [pg 10] come out of it every time, and even though for the first twenty times you are conscious of a sense of defeat rather than of victory in surviving it, each time will be a gain. Each time will mean that fractional death within you, and win the end a larger life. You will not understand that now, and so for the time I ask you simply to believe it. Don't think about it - you can't. Just remember that I say it's true, as you've discovered other things I've said from time to time to be. It is true. Don't take what I say above, darling, as a prohibition on writing letters or parts of letters such as I've been referring to. I want you to write them, whenever you feel that way. You can repeat the same things you've said before, with the same intensity. Of course you'll continue to feel that way - even after thinking, having just survived such a period, that you've recovered your strength and balance. Don't let that fool you with doubting the one thing in you which is most precious to me, to Wendy and to yourself alike - your own integrity. Integrity means capacity for suffering straightforwardly, for absorbing suffering and making it creative, as well as for experiencing joy. Anyone who has capacity for joy has the capacity to endure suffering and make it purposeful. Think of the many who have neither, really - Paula and [Brie?], just [pg 11] to begin close at hand. You have so much capacity for joy, darling, and so many little sidelights from the things you say in your letters show me that even your capacity for joy is growing and deepening in these dismal hours. Don't worry about what kind of a wife will be left to greet me when I return. Isn't it curious how subtle and insidiously the fact of being deprived of active affection and expression of it can play on your self importance and consciousness of adequacy? We shall both have little ravages, little psychological hurts to repair by then. But I fancy that it will take no more than a matter of weeks to do the job. And it isn't worth speculating about meanwhile. I love you wholly, dearly beloved, and more with every letter I get from you - love you with no illusion, and with growing respect for you and for myself. Your devoted husband Warren Letters like this, and like the ones marked [CJ?] that you were concerned about, I simply vouch for and have censored without anyone's reading them.
