UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS, PAUL VALERY, THE PAST

In the front hall of John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY were two young men recruiting for the Marine Corps officer's training program. I asked if this was the PLC course. They said it was and that I might be a little too young for it. I said, I had been once very favorably disposed to that course.

I am sure they did not know what to make of this man walking away.

In a letter (January 25, 1963) home from Beloit College I wrote to my parents back in Patchogue:
USMC. I'm going to Rockford to take the test as this will be my last chance and I want to take the training this summer the first half... Last night and most of the day it hovered around -10. Today it is a little warmer but not much

A second letter (February 1, 1963) I wrote:
I am giving up the USMC deal. It was so cold and sluggish that it is almost impossible to get to that center in Rockford that is like a corpse and as cold as Arctic. As a result I'll work this summer if I cant get an invitation to bum around the country which would be ideal.

From PAUL VALERY Note and Digression to THE METHOD OF LEONARDO:

To reread, then; to reread after having forgotten-- to reread oneself, without a hint of tenderness, or fatherly feeling; coldly and with critical acumen and in a mood terribly conducive to ridicule and contempt, with an alien gaze, and a destructive eye-- is to recast one's work, or feel that it should be recast, into a very different mold.

*

The personality is composed of memories, habits, inclinations responses...

*

In each of our individual lives, at the depth where treasures are buried, there is the fundamental permanence of a consciousness that depends on nothing

*

Nothing is so strange as lucidity at grips with inadequacy.

*

I knew that the works are always falsifications or contrivances; fortunately the author is never the man. The life of one is never the life of the other; no matter how many details we accumulate on the life of Racine, they will not teach us the art of writing his verse.

*

Nor is the life of author ever the life of the man he is

*

I was yearning for a splendid theme. How little that amounts to, on the page!

*

... it is ignoble to write from enthuiasm alone. Enthusiasm is not a state of mind for a writer.