Friday, November 21st

I FINISHED the preface yesterday and sent it off. Early in the week, after revising it several times, I suddenly had a moment of hope and trust in this book. Perhaps it is good enough, after all. I have been in such an anxiety about it for weeks that I am low in my mind and feel rather frail and exhausted.

When the news of the seven-year persecution of Martin Luther King by the FBI came out yesterday and the day before, I felt rather sick. We live in such a dirty world, and as individuals seem more and more helpless to change it. When I am tired, it all becomes overwhelming like a dismal fog that never lifts. Of course, Franco’s death the other day had reminded me of the idealism, the lifting up of so much courage thirty-six years ago in the rallying of youth from all over the world to help the Republic—long, long ago. Then there was still hope and now there is not. Then, before the Nazi camps, we could still believe in the goodness of man. Now man looks more and more like the murderer of all life, animals too—he is the killer of whales and of his own species—the death bringer. Under everything I do there is this sense that there is no foundation anymore. In what do we believe? can we believe? On what to stand firm? There has to be something greater than each individual—greater, yet something that gives him the sense that his life is vital to the whole, that what he does affects the whole, has meaning.