Hi!

Hi! handsome hunting man
Fire your little gun.
Bang! Now the animal
Is dead and dumb and done.
Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again,
Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!

de la Mare

(...)

“Every artist,” said Santayana, “is a moralist though he needn’t preach,” and de la Mare is one who doesn’t. His poems are neither satirical nor occasional; indeed, I cannot recall coming across in his work a single Proper Name, whether of a person or a place, which one could identify as a real historical name. Nor, though he is a lyric, not a dramatic, poet, are his poems “personal” in the sense of being self-confessions; the "I" in them is never identical with the Mr. de la Mare one might have met at dinner, and none are of the kind which excite the curiosity of a biographer. Nevertheless, implicit in all his poetry are certain notions of what constitutes the Good Life. Goodness, they seem to say, is rooted in wonder, awe, and reverence for the beauty and strangeness of creation.

Wonder itself is not goodness—de la Mare is not an aesthete— but it is the only, or the most favorable, soil in which goodness can grow. Those who lose the capacity for wonder may become clever but not intelligent, they may lead moral lives themselves, but they will become insensitive and moralistic towards others. A sense of wonder is not something we have to learn, for we are born with it; unfortunately, we are also born with an aggressive lust for power which finds its satisfaction in the enslavement and destruction of others. We are, or in the course of our history we have become, predatory animals like the mousing cat and the spotted flycatcher. This lust for power, which, if we surrender completely to it, can turn us into monsters like Seaton’s Aunt, is immanent in every child.

Lovely as Eros, and half-naked too,
He heaped dried beach-drift, kindled it, and, lo!
A furious furnace roared, the sea-winds blew .. .
Vengeance divine!
And death to every foe!
Young god! and not ev’n
Nature eyed askance
The fire-doomed
Empire of a myriad ants.

It is only with the help of wonder, then, that we can develop a virtue which we are certainly not born with, compassion, not to be confused with its conceit-created counterfeit, pity. Only from wonder, too, can we learn a style of behavior and speech which is no less precious in art than in life; for want of a better word we call it good-manners or breeding, though it has little to do with ancestry, school or income. To be well-bred means to have respect for the solitude of others, whether they be mere acquaintances or, and this is much more difficult, persons we love; to be ill-bred is to importune attention and intimacy, to come too close, to ask indiscreet questions and make indiscreet revelations, to lecture, to bore.

Forewords and afterwords
W. H Auden

Nature has provided for the necessary tasks of life by giving the majority of men brains that do not work

The next piece of work was provided by Louis Bonaparte, the King of Holland. He wished to reorganise education in his Kingdom, and in June, 1809, consulted Fontanes, who forwarded the letter to Joubert, together with a folio volume sent by the King, for him to make a précis. Joubert was, as usual, ill and, as usual, full of ideas.

“I was dead yesterday’? ; he wrote. “I feel a little resuscitated to-day, and I should like not to spoil the feeling ; but it depends on how great a hurry you are in. If you only wish to reply to the King’s letter, you can do it at once ; but if you wish to give him pleasure, you must take a little time. There are doubts, scruples, confusions of thought: to dissipate all these, there must be lucidity. The subject must be treated with some depth, if with a light touch, and we must discuss our notes.

Will you take the risk of waiting a few more days, and give me this week? ... Think, and decide. I can, with the stump of my pen, dispatch hurriedly what remains to be done; but I shall wear myself out and spoil everything. If you can wait over the holidays, I can go to Issy, take a bath, and finish without fatigue and with pleasure. Your King will be better served, and you will end better pleased with him, me and yourself.”

Fontanes knew his Joubert, and pressed for a quick answer.

He got it, possibly less philosophical, and certainly more practical than usual : including a prayer that heaven might defend the children of the poor from learning all that the Dutch Ministry wished to have them taught.

“‘ They would be no longer fit to work. The strength of a man, if it is drawn to the brain, leaves the hands. Whosoever is fitted to give profound and sustained attention to what is abstract becomes unfitted for what is mechanical. Nature has provided for the necessary tasks of life by giving the majority of men brains that do not work.” Joubert was all against the possibility of experiment allowed for in the Dutch code ; such experiments in education, if they did not prove phenomenally successful, did nothing but break the tradition of respect for antiquity, rouse ambition and destroy the modesty of mediocrity. In such work lay vanity, and in inaction, good sense. Fontanes hurriedly wrote an appreciative letter, asking for a final instalment; that received, he could shine, even though it were with borrowed light. So the next day, for the third day running, Joubert once more took up his quill, and continued with a précis and criticism of the Dutch plan for secondary education, which he found inferior to the scheme for primary schools.

He made the criticism that the Dutchmen were wrong in thinking that a change of subject was enough to rest a child and enable him to concentrate afresh; it might rest a grown man, but a child needed movement, games and real distractions. The Dutch scheme might make a hard-working boy seem more intelligent than he was, but it would be a false and unprofitable seeming that could lead to nothing. No child should be taught to be cleverer than he was. Joubert was too tired to finish that day; Fontanes must wait for his opinion on the Dutch universities until the morrow. Fontanes reluctantly waited, only to receive a grand condemnation of Protestant education in its later stages, and a still finer eulogy of the classical training given by the Teaching Orders in Catholic countries. ‘The difference between them was the difference between grammar and literature. The letter ended with a magnificent condemnation of modern education, which left  its pupils ignorant of how little they knew. The letter was one of the best and most consecutive pieces of literature that Joubert ever produced; but it was not of much use to Fontanes when he came to compose his final report to the King of Holland.

Joubert returned to Villeneuve in the middle of October to make the postponed inspection of the schools of the Yonne.

He announced his departure in a letter to Fontanes that began “‘ Monseigneur,” and after giving him details of the proposed journey, continued with a jesting appreciation of himself.

“I say to you in all sincerity and in that popular style which suits frankness so well: ‘ My lord, you are very lucky to have me.’ I do my duty remarkably well, and I know how to amuse you in the process ; I play with your ermine and enliven your royalty. You have subjugated everyone around you except me. Every voice is silent before yours, except mine. I tell you everything I think, and in your company I think what I please. But for me, you would not have in your empire a subject who would always dare to tell you the entire truth. But for me, there would not be a free man at your court, or at least not one who, having regard to ancient intimacy and friendship, could appear free, as I can, publicly and completely, without offending against the proprieties. But for me, you would not enjoy, outside your family, the delights of contradiction ; but for me, nothing would ever recall to your memory the sweet and ancient state of equality.

“And remark this, my lord: he who knows how to laugh with you at his own occupations, and at yours, is a man of gravity and even of austerity ; he who plays with your dignities is the man who attaches the greatest importance to your rank, to your functions, who respects them most in his heart and mind ; the man who contra- dicts you most often is he who has for you, in secret, the most decided weakness ; the man who is the least your slave is also the man who is most devoted to you.

"You have never obtained from me, and you never will obtain, a blind approbation always ; but you have always exercised over me, and always will, each and every day, in spite of yourself and of me, a more glorious ascendancy. For thirty years and some months I have loved you; that is but a trifle; for thirty years and some months I have had for your talent in all its details, for the great traits of conduct and of character, a sentiment much greater than friendship ; a sentiment more rare and more lofty ; a sentiment which few souls can inspire and few keep ; a sentiment of which few men are worthy and few great men even capable ; in fine, a unique sentiment, to say all, of an incurable admiration. . .”

Joubert duly made his tour of inspection, and made it as a crusade in favour of the classics and of religion, of austerity in judgment and of gentleness in conduct, and of a spiritual reticence that should make the teacher inspire his pupils to be themselves rather than impress his own soul upon them.

Altogether both Joubert and the schoolmasters of the Yonne found the inspection more interesting and less alarming than they had anticipated. Joubert returned to Villeneuve with a new idea of the infinity of things a man could do well if only he were forced to do them. He reported his findings in due form to the inspector-general, with a postscript, not quite official, to say that he had written twice to the Grand-Maitre and that he thought Fontanes might at least have indicated to him that he had read the letters. He would never in his life write to him again, even though the whim to do so might seize him from time to time. Indeed Fontanes’ neglect in replying to his outburst of affection had hurt him deeply.

He wrote to Chénedollé, who wished to be appointed a professor, with a tender kindness that strove to efface the memory of Fontanes’ casual forgetfulness to himself.

Joubert returned to Paris after Christmas, having successfully avoided an official reception, at which Fontanes had covered himself with glory by declaring to Napoleon that youth no longer had need of the example of the heroes of antiquity, now that they had in the Emperor an example of perfect heroism. Joubert attended his educational committees and consoled himself with the reading of seventeenth century writers. He was faor ever advising Fontanes about education in general and the University in particular, and for ever being disappointed when expediency proved more important than the principles he advocated.

The Unselfish Egoist
A Life of Joseph Joubert

Joan Evens

The Psychoanalysis of Skiing

The importance that sport has generally acquired in modern life is a significant phenomenon, and is one of the markers of the shift of the Western soul towards very different interests from those that were predominant in the 19th century. Modern sport would therefore deserve a dedicated study. Moreover, it would be interesting to compare modern sport and its general significance with its counterpart in the ancient Western, Greek and Roman world, as well as in non-European civilisations.

As regards this second point, I have provided some essential points of reference in another work of mine.75 As for modern sport, I only wish to draw attention here to one particular variety of it, namely skiing. This sport is a rather recent trend. In Nordic countries skiing had enjoyed a certain popularity, yet not as a real sport (it apparently only made its début as a sport at Oslo in 1870, when people from Telemark used this means of transport to outstrip their opponents in a race, causing a general stir);76 rather, skiing was used as a practical device, not unlike sledges and poles, which came in handy in areas that were covered in snow for much of the year. By contrast, the enjoyment of skiing in itself, as a thrilling activity, only spread among the younger generations in major non-Nordic Western countries, including Britain, in recent times — roughly, in the inter-war period. The sudden success and great popularity of this sport, and the spontaneous interest and enthusiasm which men and women alike display toward it, are distinctive elements that beg the question of whether this phenomenon may be due not only to extrinsic factors but also to the general orientation of modern life.

Let us explore this possibility by asking ourselves: what is the essential psychological trait associated with skiing as a sport? What is the ‘moment’ in this sport to which everything else, in most cases, is subordinated? The answer is quite obvious: the descent. This emerges quite clearly when we compare this to the salient point and meaning of another sport that is practised in largely the same environment as skiing, namely mountaineering.

In mountaineering the essential element, the focus of interest of the sport, is constituted by the act of ascending; in skiing this instead corresponds to descending. The dominant motif in mountaineering is conquest; the attainment of the peak, the point beyond which one cannot go any higher, marks the end of the truly interesting stage for the rock or ice-wall climber (let us leave aside here the technical-acrobatic deviations displayed by a certain kind of recent mountaineering). The opposite takes place in the case of skiing: if one ascends, this is mostly in order to descend.

The hours of toil required to reach a certain altitude are only faced in order to then take the ‘downhill run’, the Abfahrt, the swift skiing descent.77 Thus in the more modern and fashionable winter sport stations the problem has been solved by building cableways, chair lifts and sledge lifts that meet the real interest of skiers by effortlessly taking them up, allowing them then to ski down in a few minutes and to take the same cableway — or a different one — once again in order to face another descent, until they have had enough. Consequently, whereas mountaineering is characterised by the thrill of the ascent, as a struggle and conquest, the sport of skiing is characterised by the thrill of descent with its speed and, if one may put it so, its fall time.
This last point is worth emphasising. A person’s way of relating to his or her own body varies significantly from mountaineering to skiing.

Mountaineering entails a far more direct perception of one’s own body, with acts of balancing, efforts, thrusts and moves that require complete control over the body, and careful and well-planned manoeuvres to be performed in relation to the various challenges posed by climbing and ascending, by choosing and clinging to a handhold, and by the resistance of a step cut into the ice. In skiing we find something quite different: a person’s way of relating to his or her own body is certainly subject to the force of gravity and may be compared to the relation between a car driven at a certain speed and its driver; once he has ‘set off’, the skier must do one thing alone: guide himself through appropriate movements in order to regulate his speed and direction. This will lead him to master his reflexes (making them instinctive, reliable and quick after much taxing training), thereby allowing him to control his descent, more or less like a driver who enjoys speeding down a street filled with pedestrians and other vehicles without slowing down, using his quick reflexes to avoid this or that obstacle and brush past it, almost playfully, before moving on to continue his race. The impression produced by a skilled skier is precisely of this sort.

As regards the more inward aspect of the phenomenon, i.e. what it ultimately gives the human spirit, it is worth recalling the impression felt by someone who puts on a pair of skies for the first time. This is the impression of having the ground slip away from under one’s feet, of falling. The same feeling resurfaces when one strives to master the most difficult forms of this sport: swift downhill runs or jumps. Hence, I believe it is possible to argue that the deepest meaning of skiing lies in the following fact: the instinctual feeling of physical fear, with the reflex it triggers of withdrawing or hanging onto something, is overcome and transformed into a feeling of elation and pleasure, and developed into the impulse of going ever faster and playing in various different ways with the speed and acceleration that the force of gravity exerts on bodies. In this respect, skiing may be defined as the technique, game, and thrill of falling. By practising this sport, one develops a certain physical daring or fearlessness, but of a particular sort, quite distinct from the daring of the mountaineer, or even opposite to it in terms of its meaning: we may well say that it is an essentially ‘modern’ kind of daring.

The above term encapsulates not only the symbolic meaning of the sport of skiing, but probably the deep, underlying reason for its sudden popularity as well. Of all the many types of sport, skiing ranks among those most devoid of any relation to the symbols of the previous world-view. So to draw upon the comparison we made previously, whereas the ancient traditions of all peoples are replete with symbols related to the mountain as the goal of an ascent and site of transfiguration — despite the fact that mountaineering was not really practised in ancient times at all — they contain nothing that may be associated with the sport of skiing.78 It is essentially the ‘modern’ soul that feels at ease with this sport: the soul drunk with speed, ‘becoming’, and accelerating or indeed frantic motion — what until recently was praised as the motion of ‘progress’ and ‘intense living’, and which has in fact been nothing but a kind of collapse and downfall. The thrill of this motion, combined with a cerebral and abstract feeling that one is in control of forces which have been unleashed and which one really no longer possesses, is typical of the modern way in which the Ego grasps the sharpest perception of itself. I believe that this existential orientation, be it only as a reflection, contributes to the enthusiasm for skiing as a sport and that it distinguishes it in particular from mountaineering — conceived as a physical and sporting expression of the opposite symbol, the symbol of ascending, elevating oneself, and conquering the forces of gravity, which is to say the forces at work in a fall.

The acknowledgement of all this does not necessarily lead to a particular value judgement. Indeed, from a more external perspective, one may assign skiing the same recognition that one assigns certain aspects of that ‘naturism’ which has become popular in recent times: as a winter sport, when practised seriously (without the snobbishness and foolishness associated with the fashionable centres of such sport, with their carnivalesque clothes, and all the rest), skiing can certainly help compensate, in a way, for the damage inflicted on many men’s organism nowadays by life in big cities, as well as contribute to a certain psycho-physical activation in the young. But even if one were to directly perceive the inner side of the enthusiasm for skiing in the problematic terms I have just outlined, this — at least in the case of a certain differentiated human type — is not bound to be an entirely negative thing. The maxim which applies to such a type of person, especially in the present day, may also apply within the profane domain of skiing: no experience is to be avoided, but everything must be experienced, yet in a detached way. One is to keep abreast of the wave, confirming one’s freedom.

The Bow and the Club by Julius Evola

The Craving for a Concierge of Depravity

 

What Epstein Reveals About the State of the Modern Soul

There are, as of this writing, two kinds of people in the world. There are those hunched over their screens at ungodly hours, cross-referencing flight logs with redacted email addresses, building sprawling digital corkboards connected by red string they can almost feel between their fingers — and then there are the rest, who scrolled past the latest Epstein disclosure somewhere between a reel of someone’s golden retriever and a fifteen-second pasta recipe. Both camps, as it turns out, are symptomatic of the same disease. But we will get to that.

The documents keep coming. Names keep surfacing. The constellation of figures implicated in the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein reads less like a scandal and more like the guest list for the annual meeting of whichever invisible committee actually runs the world: tech billionaires like Bill Gates, political mega-donors like Les Wexner, revered public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, intelligence operatives, law enforcement officials, members of the British Royal Family, and heads of state of the most powerful nations on Earth. It’s almost like a Caribbean version of Davos — an even more depraved one.

The sheer density of power and influence concentrated around one man’s operation should, by any reasonable standard, provoke a civilizational reckoning. Instead, it has provoked memes, a few trending hashtags, and a collective shrug from roughly half the population.

And you can almost understand why. If even a fraction of what the documents imply is true — that the people who build our technologies, shape our foreign policy, educate our children at the most elite institutions, and sit on the thrones of democratic nations were complicit in the systematic abuse of minors — then we are confronted with a conclusion so destabilizing that most people would rather swallow their tongues than speak it aloud: the ruling class of the modern world may be, in a very literal and non-hyperbolic sense, monstrous. Not incompetent. Not misguided. Not even merely corrupt. Monstrous. And if that is the case, then every institution we have trusted to organize our lives — our governments, our universities, our courts, our financial systems — is not merely flawed but potentially rotten at the root. Most people, understandably, would rather plug themselves back into the matrix and pretend none of it exists. The alternative is vertigo without a floor.

Consider one small example that went viral after a recent tranche of disclosures. An email, sent to Epstein, from a name that has been carefully blacked out. The text reads: “Thanks for the fun night. Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” Read that again. Sit with it. Now ask yourself the only question that matters: why is that name redacted? Not who sent it — though God knows that matters — but why has someone, somewhere in the machinery of justice, decided that the author of those words deserves the protection of anonymity? That person does not deserve a private life. That person deserves a prison cell and a very public execution.

And yet the black marker prevails. Whoever wielded it knows exactly who wrote that email. The only rational explanation for the redaction is that the sender is someone so important, so embedded in the architecture of power, that their exposure would trigger not simply a scandal but a genuine political or economic crisis. Possibly societal instability. And so the system, in its infinite self-preserving wisdom, protects the predator. Because the alternative — the truth — is too expensive.

Now, here is where I part company with a great many people, including many who are otherwise outraged by all of this. The question I keep hearing is: How is it possible that our leaders are so evil? How can this be? And I confess that question never really occurred to me. I was not surprised by these revelations. I might have been mildly surprised that the documents were reaching the public — that the usual mechanisms of suppression had, for once, stuttered and coughed up something real — but the content itself? No. It lined up with exactly what I would have expected from a civilization built on the rotten, idiotic philosophical foundations we have been laying for the past four centuries. Understanding why this is not surprising at all requires us to do something that modernity has made almost unbearable: think.

We live in the modern world. That sentence is so banal it barely deserves ink. But what it means — what it truly, structurally, philosophically means — is something almost nobody bothers to examine. The modern age was shaped by philosophical movements that most people have never heard of but that dictate, with remarkable precision, how all of us live, what we value, and what we are capable of ignoring.

The history of philosophy is not some dusty irrelevance confined to tenured eccentrics in underfunded departments. It is the invisible architecture of your daily life. The eccentric, antisocial academics who argued about epistemology in cold European parlors three hundred years ago are, whether you like it or not, the architects of the world you wake up in every morning.

Modernism, broadly speaking, fractured into two camps. On one side: rationalism — the conviction that only what occurs inside the mind can truly be known. Truth, under this regime, is not something you discover in the world outside yourself; it is generated within the sealed theater of your own consciousness. You, the subject, become the sole object of interest. Everything external — the world, other people — is epistemologically suspect at best and irrelevant at worst.

On the other side: empiricism — the belief that only what can be measured and observed through the senses constitutes real knowledge. This is the philosophical wellspring of scientism, of materialist atheism, of the peculiar modern conviction that if you cannot quantify it, it does not exist.

Both of these positions, despite their surface disagreements, converge on a single devastating conclusion: the only experiences that ultimately matter to a human being are sensations. If reality is confined to your own mind, then your subjective sensory experience is king. If reality is confined to what your senses can measure, then once again, sensation reigns supreme. And here is where the trouble begins — with the quiet, imperceptible erosion of everything that once made human beings capable of moral seriousness.

Sensation is, by its nature, fleeting. Compare it to thought, which can linger, evolve, deepen, take on the complexity of a cathedral over years of contemplation. Compare it to emotion, which can shape the course of a life, sustain love through decades, fuel a revolution. Sensation does none of this. You taste something sweet; the pleasure arrives and vanishes in the same breath. You hear a beautiful chord; it decays before you can hold it. The entire experience is over almost before it begins. And a civilization that has decided — through its philosophy, its economics, its technology — that sensation is the highest and perhaps only meaningful category of human experience has condemned itself to a very particular kind of hell: the hell of repetition.

Because the only way to prolong a pleasurable sensation is to repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it again. The sugar hit, the dopamine spike, the sexual thrill, the scroll, the swipe, the next episode, the next drink, the next purchase — the rhythm is always the same. Repetition hardens into habit. Habit calcifies into addiction. And addiction is, by definition, the annihilation of free will.

We strengthen our appetites — which have no moral compass whatsoever — while systematically weakening the will, which is the only faculty capable of choosing between right and wrong. We become, in the most precise and clinical sense, less free with every cycle. The machine of sensation runs and faster, and the human being inside it becomes progressively less capable of doing anything other than feeding it.

Oswald Spengler, writing over a century ago in The Decline of the West, identified this pattern, as we have already discussed. He described the late stage of every civilization as one characterized by what he called the transition from culture to civilization — from living, organic form to polished, hollow mechanism. The symptoms he catalogued read like a clinical description of the twenty-first century: “senile need for rest, post-heroism and historylessness, artificiality and rigidity in all spheres of life, dominance of inorganic world-cities over vital countryside, cool factuality replacing reverence for tradition, materialism and irreligion, anarchic sensuality, bread and circuses mentality, entertainment industries, moral collapse and artistic death.” He wrote this in 1918. He might as well have been live-tweeting from your local shopping mall.

But there is a second pathology that grows directly from the first, and it is arguably worse. The person enslaved to sensation does not merely repeat — they bore. The monotony of doing the same thing over and over again, chasing the same diminishing returns, eventually becomes intolerable. And so the addict — whether they are addicted to sugar, porn (and in extend sex), status, or spectacle — begins to chase not just sensation but novelty. The new, the unfamiliar, the exotic, the strange. Anything to break the deadening rhythm of repetition. Anything to feel something again.

This is why modern art abandoned beauty for the grotesque. Beauty requires contemplation; the grotesque demands only a reaction. A urinal in a gallery, a canvas slashed with a razor, a building that looks like it was designed by a migraine — these things do not reward sustained attention. They provoke a momentary jolt of disorientation, which is the closest thing to genuine experience that a sensation-addicted culture can still manufacture. And as soon as the jolt fades — as soon as the strange becomes familiar — we tear it down and build something even stranger.

Our ancestors built cathedrals meant to stand for a thousand years. We build glass towers that last two decades before we demolish them because the aesthetic has gone stale. And now we have crowned our civilization’s architectural ambitions with “marvels” like the Burj Khalifa — a $1.5 billion empty, ugly Arabic phallic monument to absolutely nothing, rising out of the desert like a middle finger aimed at taste itself. Built by slave laborers, bankrolled by a torture-loving pedophile and admired — admired — primarily by a swarm of intellectually vacant influencers who fled to Dubai so they would not have to pay taxes on whatever pittance they scrape together by filming themselves pointing at things and posting it online. This is our Chartres. This is our Parthenon. A vanity project for a petrostate, worshipped by people who cannot locate it on a map. For context: sending the New Horizons spacecraft to explore Pluto — an actual expansion of human knowledge, a genuine extension of the species’ reach into the cosmos — cost $700 million. Less than half of what it took to erect a glittering desert obelisk that exists for no purpose other than to sugarcoat Muslim inferiority complexes. Which way, Western man?

Alexander Demandt, the German historian, captured this perfectly: “Beauty was displaced on one hand by the pleasant, on the other by the aberrant, ugly, bizarre. A wastebasket at Documenta became art through a catalogue number. There is no noise the Philharmonic’s auditorium won’t accept as music if the program announces it as such.”

“Beauty was displaced on one hand by the pleasant, on the other by the aberrant, ugly, bizarre. A wastebasket at Documenta became art through a catalogue number. There is no noise the Philharmonic’s auditorium won’t accept as music if the program announces it as such.” - Alexander Demandt, German historian

This same restless hunger for novelty explains our addiction to our phones, to the infinite scroll, to the algorithmic drip-feed of content that promises both sensation and surprise just below the bevel of the screen. For-profit technology companies have understood this about us better than we understand it about ourselves. They have built machines that exploit the precise vulnerability that four centuries of modernist philosophy created: our inability to sit still, to be silent, to contemplate anything that does not deliver an immediate sensory payoff. The average American stares at a screen for eight hours a day like it is their life support for a soul that has forgotten what it was built for.

The same principle governs our moral landscape. Our values shift from decade to decade with the frantic pace of fashion precisely because they are not rooted in anything permanent. Go back twenty years and try to explain the concept of preferred pronouns to the average person. They would stare at you as though you had grown a second head. Not because they were “Nazis”, but because the entire idiotic conceptual framework had not yet been invented — or, more accurately, had not yet become novel enough to be interesting. We chase moral novelty with the same desperate energy we chase every other kind, discarding yesterday’s convictions like last season’s wardrobe, not because they were wrong but because they were boring.

Now — and here is where the Epstein files become not merely a scandal but a parable — consider what all of this means when it is scaled up to the level of the most powerful human beings on Earth.

The average person, enslaved to sensation and starved for novelty, causes relatively limited damage. Your doom-scrolling habit is not going to destabilize a nation - at least not yet. Your sugar addiction is not going to traumatize a child. You are constrained, as most of us are, by the simple brutalities of necessity — the job, the bills, the mortgage, the sheer logistical impossibility of acting on every appetite. But wealth, real wealth, the kind measured in billions, does one thing above all else: it multiplies choice. It removes every practical constraint between desire and action.

The tropical beach you daydream about? For a billionaire, that is a Tuesday. The exotic cuisine you save up to try once a year? That is their airplane food. The experience you consider a once-in-a-lifetime thrill? They exhausted that entire category before they turned twenty-five.

A human being with no formation in objective morality, conditioned by sensation alone, obsessed with novelty, and possessed of virtually unlimited resources is not merely a decadent figure. They are a dangerous one. Because the territory of the novel, for such a person, extends far beyond what ordinary people can even conceive. What is exotic to you is monotonous to them. What shocks you is, for them, last year’s indulgence. If they are going to fend off the creeping frost of boredom they must venture into territories that the rest of us would find not merely unfamiliar but morally unthinkable.

And with no philosophical framework to tell them stop, with no cultivated moral intuition to intervene, with nothing but appetite and means and the suffocating fear of boredom, they will drift — inevitably, predictably, almost mechanically — into the darkest corners of human experience.

An anecdote about the French novelist Gustave Flaubert and his traveling companion Maxime Du Camp, talks about them journeying through the Middle East in the mid-nineteenth century, when such a trip still qualified as exotically avant-garde. The two men encountered, on the water, two Arab boats transporting slaves to Cairo. The cargo was mostly women and girls, stolen from the territory of Gallaas. Flaubert and Du Camp boarded the vessels. They stayed as long as they could. They haggled over ostrich feathers and, grotesquely, over an Abyssinian girl. Their purpose, as Flaubert himself recorded, was “to enjoy the chic of the spectacle.”

Read that again and let the full weight of it settle. A boat full of kidnapped women and girls, destined for sexual slavery in a foreign country, and two of Europe’s most celebrated literary minds treated it as dinner theater. Not a horror to be obstructed. Not an injustice to be fought. An experience to be consumed. A novel sensation. Avant-garde tourism at its most literal and most obscene.

Flaubert was no ignorant brute. He was the man who wrote Madame Bovary, a novel whose entire architecture is built around the dangers of boredom — of what happens when ennui, “like a spider, silently spins its shadowy web in every cranny of the heart.” He understood the disease. He simply could not resist participating in it. The modernist mind, even when it sees the abyss, keeps walking toward it, because the abyss is at least interesting.

If you understand this — if you see the through-line from Flaubert on that slave boat to the guests on Epstein’s island — then the strategy behind someone like Epstein becomes almost banal in its legibility: If you want to manipulate, control, or blackmail the richest and most powerful people in the world, you do not offer them money. They have money. You do not offer them status. They have status. You become a curator of sensations — the kind so exotic, so far beyond the ordinary menu of earthly pleasures, that even a billionaire will find them unfamiliar. And the only sensations that remain genuinely novel to someone who has already exhausted every legal and socially acceptable form of pleasure are, by definition, the ones that cross into the morally unthinkable.

You become, in other words, precisely what Jeffrey Epstein was: a concierge of depravity, catering to a clientele whose philosophical formation — or total absence thereof — has left them incapable of recognizing a moral boundary until they have already obliterated it.

And these people do not think of themselves as monsters. That is the crucial thing. They think of themselves as Napoleons, as Alexanders, as beings so far above the common run of humanity that ordinary moral categories simply do not apply. The same standards that govern a Thérèse of Lisieux or a Mother Teresa — humility, restraint, compassion, self-denial — are, in their minds, the quaint scruples of the provincial and the weak. They are among the great and powerful. And to the great and powerful, nothing should be refused. Not even by their own consciences.

Cardinal Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, gave a speech in which he warned of what he called a “dictatorship of relativism” — a regime that “recognizes nothing as definitive and leaves only one’s ego and its desires as the final measure.”

He also observed “a strange and only pathologically explicable self-hatred in the West, which laudably tries to understand foreign values but no longer likes itself.” This is not a man given to hysteria. And yet his diagnosis aligns perfectly with what the Epstein files reveal: a ruling class unmoored from any transcendent standard of good, drifting through an ever-expanding ocean of available sensation, protected by the very institutions they have hollowed out.

But here is the part that should keep you up at night, the part that transforms this from a story about them into a story about us. We are guilty of the same disease. The difference is only one of scale. Our appetite for the latest Epstein disclosures — the new emails, the new photographs, the new names — is itself a manifestation of the same hunger for novelty that created the conditions for Epstein’s operation in the first place. We are not contemplating the horror with the gravity it deserves. We are consuming it. Scrolling through it. Treating it as content. As spectacle. We are, in our own modest way, Flaubert on the slave boat — not perpetrating the evil, certainly, but savoring the chic of it, the thrill of proximity to something so dark it qualifies as novel.

We stare at screens for eight hours a day because those machines deliver a steady intravenous drip of sensation and novelty directly into the pleasure centers of our brains. We cannot imagine logging off, being still, being silent, sitting with the questions that might surface in the absence of stimulation. We have lost the capacity — or perhaps the courage — to contemplate the deepest depths of the soul and the lingering moral questions that haunt anyone who dares to be quiet long enough to hear them.

And if we, with our limited means and our mortgages and our nine-to-fives, are already this enslaved to the cycle of sensation and novelty, then who among us can say with certainty that, given unlimited resources and zero moral formation, we would not end up in precisely the same place as the names in those redacted files?

The honest answer is: we cannot. The only difference between us and them is that we have not yet been afforded the same temptations. Our poverty — of money, of access, of opportunity — is, paradoxically, our protection. But it is a fragile protection, and it is eroding daily because when you look at adult content readily available to everyone for free, it is not about naked women or watching two people having sex anymore. It is evolving—or maybe devolving. More depravity, more weird fetishes, more “barely legal teen” titles, more degradation of females as sex slaves—and it’s free for you to watch. Every day. Men watch this as if it’s the evening news. Nothing here is different. It is the poor people’s digital version of Epstein’s island. It is the philosophical infrastructure that produces Epstein-class predators is the same one that produces Epstein-class consumers. We are all downstream of the same polluted river.

Jerry Seinfeld once quipped that the secret to life is to waste time in ways that you enjoy. It is a funny line. It is also, if taken as a philosophy, a prescription for moral catastrophe. Don’t just enjoy yourself while wasting time. That is how you become a moral monster without ever noticing the transformation. That is how you wake up one morning on an island in the Caribbean, surrounded by people who have lost the ability to distinguish between pleasure and predation, and realize — if you are still capable of realization — that the road to this place was paved not with dramatic acts of villainy but with a million tiny surrenders to the tyranny of sensation.

The antidote — the only antidote — is to refuse the terms of the deal. To refuse to believe that sensation and novelty are all this life offers. To cultivate silence. To practice stillness. To orient yourself, deliberately and stubbornly, toward the things that modernism has taught us to ignore: truth as an objective reality that exists whether we acknowledge it or not; goodness as a standard that binds us regardless of our preferences; beauty as something real and worthy of sustained, selfless contemplation — not as decoration, not as content, but as a window into the permanent things that outlast every trend, every appetite, every empire.

Spengler was right about the arc of civilizations. Demandt was right about the marriage of refined lifestyle and declining life force. Ratzinger was right about the dictatorship of relativism. Flaubert, in his bitter, self-destructive way, was right about ennui. And John Senior was right that the death of a culture begins not with an invasion but with the slow, voluntary abandonment of everything that made the culture worth defending.

We were made for the eternal. Fleeting sensations will never satisfy that hunger — they only deepen it, producing addiction and boredom in an endless, tightening spiral. Breaking free of that spiral is how you avoid becoming just another tourist in the kind of moral nightmare that men like Jeffrey Epstein are willing to curate in order to exploit every soul they can reach.

The files will keep coming. The names will keep surfacing. The Reels will keep playing. And the choice before each of us remains exactly what it has always been: to consume the spectacle, or to step away from the screen, sit in the terrifying silence, and ask ourselves the only question that has ever really mattered — what kind of person am I becoming?

A Lily Bit

Tucker Carlson Stands Up for Privacy (to a point)

In a recent interview on the topic of protecting privacy, Tucker Carlson and his guest Yannik Schrade, say some exalted things indeed about the importance of privacy, all of them no doubt true: Privacy is synonymous with freedom, no less. But as with Carlson’s previous panegyrics to freedom of speech (below), this one is limited and selective. Carlson and Schrade are most concerned with threats to privacy posed by technology. But you hardly need to worry about losing your privacy to surveillance bots when you readily give it away to judges seated right in front of you. And how can you claim to be defending privacy while ignoring government officials and government bodies that routinely

1. summon legally innocent people to their presence;

2. demand that they surrender personal documents, papers, and effects about their private life;

3. order them out of their homes;

4. demand access to their bank accounts and empty the contents;

5. confiscate their wages;

6. regulate their conversations with their family members, including their children;

7. demand that children act as informers about their private lives;

8. supervise and micro-manage the upbringing of their children;

9. regulate their speech, expression, and religious practices;

10. order the physical mutilation of their children;

11. jail them without trial; and most serious of all,

12. seize control of their children and keep them separated from their children most or all of the time?

Privacy is protected in the United States by the Fourth Amendment (among other constitutional provisions). (And it is not emphasized enough that the US Constitution is rooted in the English Common Law, so its protections are at least implicitly morally binding on other English-speaking countries, which is why the US Constitution is admissible, for example, in English courts.)

I write about routine violations of the Fourth Amendment by family courts in my book, Taken Into Custody. Here is a brief excerpt:

The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Yet…parents suspected of no legal wrongdoing and who have given no grounds or agreement for divorce are routinely ordered without warrants to surrender not only their children but personal diaries, notebooks, correspondence, financial records, and other documents. Those unwilling or unable to produce the demanded documents can be fined, ordered to pay attorneys’ fees, and summarily incarcerated. … Fathers are regularly interrogated behind closed doors about intimate family matters…such as conversations with their children and spouse, and they can be jailed for failing to answer. … In shades of Soviet psychiatry, citizens who refuse to submit to this inquisition – and even those who do not – can be ordered to undergo a “mental evaluation.” Fathers against whom no evidence of wrongdoing is presented are now routinely ordered to submit to “plethysmographs,” where an electronic sheath is placed over the penis while the father is forced to watch pornographic films involving children. Parents’ homes are routinely entered by government agents to determine fitness, even when it has never been questioned. If the strains of losing their children or undergoing this legal nightmare are too great, parents are wise to conceal any contact with therapists, family counselors, or physicians, since these otherwise privileged consultations and records can be demanded, examined, and used to separate them from their children. Parents swept into this litigation are terrified to discuss anything with their children or spouses (or anyone) for fear that what they say will be used against them in court. This of course is likely the intent. “Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, shortly after serving at the Nuremberg trials in 1949. “Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart.” Family courts routinely use children as informers against their parents…and to report on how they otherwise conduct their private lives. …

Though the courts claim that the secrecy in which they operate is necessary to protect family privacy, the personal information they coerce from parents is readily available to anyone. Thus the secrecy would seem to be protecting less family privacy than judges. [A local official] has described inconsistencies in the secrecy rules governing his county’s family courts and how easily private information coerced from involuntary litigants is readily available to anyone who seeks it. “Every document filed in a domestic relations case must contain some of the most private information about a person’s life,” he writes.

On this last point, family court judges certainly protect their own privacy — even at the expense of public justice — by operating in secret. Elsewhere in the book, I explain the reason:

Family courts usually operate behind closed doors and generally do not record their proceedings. Ostensibly the secrecy is to protect the family privacy of litigants, though more often it has precisely the opposite effect: The secrecy provides a cloak not to protect privacy but to invade it with impunity. “Is it possible,” asks columnist Al Knight with reference to legislation that would automatically seal all family court records, “that the district court judges, divorce lawyers, special advocates and guardians ad litem, and a cadre of social workers might simply like less public attention paid to their activities?”

When family court judges violate the Constitution, it does not just threaten the freedom of litigants; it threatens the freedom of everyone.

If you want to read more about how the US Constitution protects privacy – and how family courts are the most serious and frequent violators of those provisions and of the entire Constitution – you can find it in my book Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (and my other books). You may even wish to send a copy to Tucker Carlson.

Stephen Baskerville

https://substack.com/@stephenbaskerville

Raymond Chandler - selected quotes

In 1917, Chandler journeyed north of the United States border in order to enlist with the Gordon Highlanders. Only the twentieth century could produce the scenario of an American-born Anglo-Irishman travelling to Canada in order to join a Scottish regiment to fight Germans in France.
*
I am one of those people who have to be known exactly the right amount to be liked. I am standoffish with strangers, a form of shyness which whisky cured when I was still able to take it in the requisite quantities. I am terribly blunt, having been raised in the English tradition which permits a gentleman to be almost infinitely rude if he keeps his voice down. It depends on a complete assurance that a punch on the nose will not be the reply.
*
They obey no laws except those of gravity.
*
I personally believe, and I am not a socialist or anything of the sort, that there is a basic fallacy about our financial system. It simply implies a fundamental cheat, a dishonest profit, a non-existent value.
*
Other writers do things all the time – talk at book marts, go on autographing tours, give lectures, spread their personalities in silly interviews – which I can't help thinking make them look a bit cheap. To them it's part of the racket. To me it's the thing that makes it a racket.
*
Their freedom of choice seems to me little more than freedom to prefer death to dishonor, and that's asking too much of human nature.
*
I HATE PUBLICITY. It is nearly always dishonest and quite always stupid. I don't think it means anything at all. You don't get any until you are ‘copy’ and what you get makes you hate yourself.
*
The sort of semi-literate educated people one meets nowadays . . . are always saying, more or less, ‘You write so well I should think you would do a serious novel.’ And then you find out that what they mean by a serious novel is something by Marquand or Betty Smith, and you would probably insult them by remarking that the artistic gap between a really good mystery and the best serious novel of the last ten years is hardly measurable compared with the gap between the serious novel and any representative piece of Attic Literature from the Fourth Century BC.
*
It has seemed to me for a long time now that in straight novels the public is more and more drawn to the theme, the idea, the line of thought, the sociological or political attitude and less and less to the quality of the writing. For instance, if you were to consider Orwell's 1984 purely as a piece of fiction, you could not rate it very high. It has no magic, the scenes have very little personality . . . where he writes as a critic and interpreter of ideas rather than of people or emotions he is wonderful.
*
How, after the Katyn Forest and Moscow Treason Trials, the Ukraine famine, the Arctic prison camps, the utterly abominable rape of Berlin by the Mongolian divisions, any decent man can become a Communist is almost beyond understanding, unless it is the frame of mind that simply doesn't believe anything it doesn't like.
*
Why in God's name don't those idiots of publishers stop putting photos of writers on their dust jackets? I bought a perfectly good book . . . was prepared to like it, had read about it, and then I take a fast gander at the guy's picture and he is obviously an absolute jerk, a really appalling creep (photogenically speaking) and I can't read the damn book. The man's probably quite all right, but to me he is that photo, that oh so unposed-posed photo with the gaudy tie pulled askew, the man sitting on the edge of his desk with his feet in his chair (always sits there, thinks better). I've been through this photograph routine, know just what it does to you.
*
Because the bitter fact is that outside of two or three technical professions which require long years of preparation, there is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some  degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket.
*
How do you tell a man to go away in hard language? Scram, beat it, take off, take the air, on your way, dangle, hit the road, and so forth. All good enough. But give me the classic expression  actually used by Spike O'Donnel (of the O'Donnel brothers of Chicago, the only small outfit to tell the Capone mob to go to hell and live): What he said was: ‘Be missing’. The restraint of it is deadly.
*
There are things about the publishing business that I should like, but dealing with writers would not be one of them. Their egos require too much petting. They live over-strained lives in which far too much humanity is sacrificed to far too little art ... To all these people literature is more or less the central fact of existence. Whereas, to vast numbers of reasonably intelligent people  it is an unimportant sideline, a relaxation, an escape, a source of information, and sometimes an inspiration. But they could do without it far more easily than they could do without coffee or whisky.
*
Of course the lawyers always back each other up because they know that if they couldn't hang together they'd hang separately.
*
regarding television, 15 November 1951.
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money. After all the public is entitled to what it wants. The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.
*
Talking of agents, when I opened the morning paper one morning last week I saw that it had finally happened: somebody shot one. It was probably for the wrong reasons, but at least it was a step in the right direction.
*
I'm caught talking to myself quite a lot lately. They say that is not too bad unless you answer back. I not only answer back, I argue and get mad.
*
I am still a bit dizzy from some remarks your pal Dale Warren made about The Maltese Falcon, which he apparently regards as quite inferior to The Leavenworth Case. (Read it for laughs, if you haven't.) I reread the Falcon not long ago, and I give up. Somebody in this room has lost a straitjacket. It must be me. Frankly, I can conceive of better writing than the Falcon, and a more tender and warm attitude to life, and a more flowery ending; but by God, if you can show me twenty books written approximately 20 years back that have as much guts and life now, I'll eat them between slices of Edmund Wilson's head. Really I'm beginning to wonder quite seriously whether anybody knows what writing is anymore, whether they haven't got the whole bloody business so completely mixed up with the subject matter and significance and who's going to win the peace and what they gave him for the screen rights and if you're not a molecular physicist, you're illiterate, and so on, that there simply isn't anybody around who can read a book and say that the guy knew how to write or didn't. Even poor old Edmund Wilson, who writes as if he had a loose upper plate, dirtied his pants in the New Yorker a few short weeks ago in reviewing Marquand's last book. He wrote: ‘A novel by Sinclair Lewis, however much it may be open to objection, is at least a book by a writer – that is, a work of the imagination that imposes its atmosphere, a creation that shows the color and modelling of a particular artist's hand.’ Is that all a good writer has to do? Hell, I always thought it was, but hell I didn't know Wilson knew it.Can I do a piece for you entitled ‘The Insignificance of Significance’, in which I will demonstrate in my usual whorehouse style that it doesn't matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with  words, and that the subject matter is merely the springboard for the writer's imagination; that the art of fiction, if it can any longer be called that, has grown from nothing to an artificial synthesis in a mere matter of 300 years, and has now reached such a degree of mechanical perfection that the only way you can tell the novelists apart is by whether they write about miners in Butte, coolies in China, Jews in the Bronx, or stockbrokers on Long Island, or whatever it is; that all the women and most of the men write exactly the same, or at least choose one of half a dozen thoroughly standardized procedures; and that in spite of certain inevitable slight differences (very slight indeed on the long view) the whole damn business could be turned out by a machine just as well, and will be almost any day now; and that the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it?

*
What do I do with myself from day to day? I write when I can and I don't write when I can't; always in the morning or the early part of the day. You get very gaudy ideas at night but they don't stand up. I found this out long ago . . . I'm always seeing little pieces by writers about how they don't ever wait for inspiration; they just sit down at their little desks every morning at eight, rain or shine, hangover and broken arm and all, and bang out their little stint. However blank their minds or dim their wits, no nonsense about inspiration from them. I offer them my admiration and take care to avoid their books. Me, I wait for inspiration, though I don't necessarily call it by that name. I believe that all writing that has any life in it is done with the solar plexus. It is hard work in the sense that it may leave you tired, even exhausted. In the sense of conscious effort it is not work at all. The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn't do anything else but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it, he shouldn't try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself.
*
18 April 1949. ‘Norbert D.’ is Norbert Davis, a former Black Mask man, now destitute.It was very kind of you indeed to send me a wire about Norbert D. However right or wrong, I am sending him a couple of hundred dollars. Who am I to judge another man's needs or deserts? It's a pretty miserable thing to live off in the country and watch them all [stories] come back and be scared. He says he has sold one out of fifteen this last year. Say it's his fault. Say he got big-headed or drunk and lazy or what have you – what difference does it make? You suffer just as much when you're wrong. More. Write it off, call it a waste, forget it, and hope the guy won't hate you for helping him, or rather for having to ask you to help him ... I know that two hundred bucks will not buy me the key to heaven, but there have been times when it would have looked like it would, and I didn't have it, and nobody was around to give it to me. I never slept in the park but I came damn close to it. I went five days without anything to eat but soup once, and I had just been sick at that. It didn't kill me, but neither did it increase my love of humanity. The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.

Four months later, on 14 August 1949, Chandler would write again to Brandt: ‘I had a letter from N.D.’s wife. It seems he committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't realized it was that desperate a situation.‘
*
I admit that if you can't create a sufficiently dominating detective, you might compensate to some extent by involving him in the dangers and emotions of the story, but that isn't a step forward, it's  a step backward. The whole point is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens; he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to keep his clothes. His moral and intellectual force is that he gets nothing but his fee, for which he will if he can protect the innocent, guard the helpless, and destroy the wicked, and the fact that he must do this while earning a meager living in a corrupt world is what makes him stand out. A rich idler has nothing to lose but his dignity; the professional is subject to all the pressures of an urban civilization and must rise above them in order to do his job. Because he represents justice and not the law, he will sometimes defy or break the law. Because he is human he can be hurt or beguiled or fooled; in extreme necessity he may even kill. But he does nothing solely for himself. Obviously this kind of detective does not exist in real life. The real life private eye is a sleazy little judge from the Burns Agency, or a strong arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack, or else a shyster and a successful trickster. He has about as much moral stature as a stop-and-go sign.

The detective story is not and never will be a ‘novel about a detective’. The detective enters it only as a catalyst. And he leaves it exactly the same as he was before.
*
Letter to Charles Morton,
9 October 1950. The Hemingway book referred to was Across the River and into the Trees.
Quite a lapse in our once interesting correspondence, don't you think? Of course it's my fault because the last letter was from you. And you are most correct in saying in it that I owe you a letter . . . Apparently it is what the years do to you. The horse which once had to be driven with a tight rein now has to be flicked with a whip in order to make him do much more than amble . . . Walter Bagehot once wrote (I am quoting from an increasingly unreliable memory) ‘In my youth, I hoped to do great things. Now, I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.’ In a sense, I am much better off than he was because I never expected to do great things, and in fact have done much better than I ever hoped to do.

My compliments to Mr Weeks on belonging to that very small minority of critics who did not find it necessary to put Hemingway in his place over his last book. Just what do the boys resent so much? Do they sense that the old wolf has been wounded and that it is a good time to pull him down? I have been reading the book. Candidly, it's not the best thing he's done, but it's still a hell of a sight better than anything his detractors could do. There's not much story in it, not much happens, hardly any scenes. And just for that reason, I suppose, the mannerisms sort of stick out. You can't expect charity from knife throwers obviously; knife throwing is their business. But you would have thought some of them might have asked themselves just what he was trying to do. Obviously he was not trying to write a masterpiece; but in a character not too unlike his own, trying to sum up the attitude of a man who is finished and knows it, and is bitter and angry about it. Apparently Hemingway had been very sick and he was not sure that he was going to get well, and he put down on paper in a rather cursory way how that made him feel to the things he had most valued. I  suppose these primping second-guessers who call themselves critics think he shouldn't have written the book at all. Most men wouldn't have. Feeling the way that he felt, they wouldn't have had the guts to write anything. I'm damn sure I wouldn't. That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure. 

now reached such a degree of mechanical perfection that the only way you can tell the novelists apart is by whether they write about miners in Butte, coolies in China, Jews in the Bronx, or stockbrokers on Long Island, or whatever it is; that all the women and most of the men write exactly the same, or at least choose one of half a dozen thoroughly standardized procedures; and that in spite of certain inevitable slight differences (very slight indeed on the long view) the whole damn business could be turned out by a machine just as well, and will be almost any day now; and that the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it?
*
What do I do with myself from day to day? I write when I can and I don't write when I can't; always in the morning or the early part of the day. You get very gaudy ideas at night but they don't stand up. I found this out long ago . . . I'm always seeing little pieces by writers about how they don't ever wait for inspiration; they just sit down at their little desks every morning at eight, rain or shine, hangover and broken arm and all, and bang out their little stint. However blank their minds or dim their wits, no nonsense about inspiration from them. I offer them my admiration and take care to avoid their books. Me, I wait for inspiration, though I don't necessarily call it by that name. I believe that all writing that has any life in it is done with the solar plexus. It is hard work in the sense that it may leave you tired, even exhausted. In the sense of conscious effort it is not work at all. The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn't do anything else but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it, he shouldn't try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself.
*
18 April 1949. ‘Norbert D.’ is Norbert Davis, a former Black Mask man, now destitute.It was very kind of you indeed to send me a wire about Norbert D. However right or wrong, I am sending him a couple of hundred dollars. Who am I to judge another man's needs or deserts? It's a pretty miserable thing to live off in the country and watch them all [stories] come back and be scared. He says he has sold one out of fifteen this last year. Say it's his fault. Say he got big-headed or drunk and lazy or what have you – what difference does it make? You suffer just as much when you're wrong. More. Write it off, call it a waste, forget it, and hope the guy won't hate you for helping him, or rather for having to ask you to help him ... I know that two hundred bucks will not buy me the key to heaven, but there have been times when it would have looked like it would, and I didn't have it, and nobody was around to give it to me. I never slept in the park but I came damn close to it. I went five days without anything to eat but soup once, and I had just been sick at that. It didn't kill me, but neither did it increase my love of humanity. The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.

Four months later, on 14 August 1949, Chandler would write again to Brandt: ‘I had a letter from N.D.’s wife. It seems he committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't realized it was that desperate a situation.‘
*
I admit that if you can't create a sufficiently dominating detective, you might compensate to some extent by involving him in the dangers and emotions of the story, but that isn't a step forward, it's  a step backward. The whole point is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens; he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to keep his clothes. His moral and intellectual force is that he gets nothing but his fee, for which he will if he can protect the innocent, guard the helpless, and destroy the wicked, and the fact that he must do this while earning a meager living in a corrupt world is what makes him stand out. A rich idler has nothing to lose but his dignity; the professional is subject to all the pressures of an urban civilization and must rise above them in order to do his job. Because he represents justice and not the law, he will sometimes defy or break the law. Because he is human he can be hurt or beguiled or fooled; in extreme necessity he may even kill. But he does nothing solely for himself. Obviously this kind of detective does not exist in real life. The real life private eye is a sleazy little judge from the Burns Agency, or a strong arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack, or else a shyster and a successful trickster. He has about as much moral stature as a stop-and-go sign.

The detective story is not and never will be a ‘novel about a detective’. The detective enters it only as a catalyst. And he leaves it exactly the same as he was before.
*
Letter to Charles Morton,
9 October 1950. The Hemingway book referred to was Across the River and into the Trees.
Quite a lapse in our once interesting correspondence, don't you think? Of course it's my fault because the last letter was from you. And you are most correct in saying in it that I owe you a letter . . . Apparently it is what the years do to you. The horse which once had to be driven with a tight rein now has to be flicked with a whip in order to make him do much more than amble . . . Walter Bagehot once wrote (I am quoting from an increasingly unreliable memory) ‘In my youth, I hoped to do great things. Now, I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.’ In a sense, I am much better off than he was because I never expected to do great things, and in fact have done much better than I ever hoped to do.

My compliments to Mr Weeks on belonging to that very small minority of critics who did not find it necessary to put Hemingway in his place over his last book. Just what do the boys resent so much? Do they sense that the old wolf has been wounded and that it is a good time to pull him down? I have been reading the book. Candidly, it's not the best thing he's done, but it's still a hell of a sight better than anything his detractors could do. There's not much story in it, not much happens, hardly any scenes. And just for that reason, I suppose, the mannerisms sort of stick out. You can't expect charity from knife throwers obviously; knife throwing is their business. But you would have thought some of them might have asked themselves just what he was trying to do. Obviously he was not trying to write a masterpiece; but in a character not too unlike his own, trying to sum up the attitude of a man who is finished and knows it, and is bitter and angry about it. Apparently Hemingway had been very sick and he was not sure that he was going to get well, and he put down on paper in a rather cursory way how that made him feel to the things he had most valued. I  suppose these primping second-guessers who call themselves critics think he shouldn't have written the book at all. Most men wouldn't have. Feeling the way that he felt, they wouldn't have had the guts to write anything. I'm damn sure I wouldn't. That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure.

But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn't just walk off the mound and weep. Mr Cyril Connolly, in a rather smoother piece of knife throwing than most of the second-guessers are capable of, suggests that Mr Hemingway should take six months off and take stock of himself. The implication here apparently is that Hemingway has fully exploited the adolescent attitude which so many people are pleased to attribute him, and should now grow up intellectually and become an adult. But why? In the sense in which Connolly would define the word, Hemingway has never had any desire to be an adult. Some writers, like painters, are born primitives. A nose full of Kafka is not at all their idea of happiness. I suppose the weakness, even the tragedy, of writers like Hemingway is that their sort of stuff demands an immense vitality; and a man outgrows his vitality without unfortunately outgrowing his furious concern with it. The kind of thing Hemingway writes cannot be written by an emotional corpse. The kind of thing Connolly writes can and is. It has its points. Some of it is very good, but you don't have to be alive to write it.

Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
10 November 1950. Hamilton, also keen to update his dust-jacket biography of Chandler following the latter's adventures in Hollywood, had asked him for some information about his life.

The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn't take things too much to heart. He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as it is to himself.

. . . I have been married since 1924 and have no children. I am supposed to be a hardboiled writer, but that means nothing. It is  merely a method of projection. Personally I am sensitive and even diffident. At times I am extremely caustic and pugnacious, at other times very sentimental. I am not a good mixer because I am very easily bored, and to me the average never seems good enough, in people or in anything else. I am a spasmodic worker with no regular hours, which is to say I only write because I feel like it. I am always surprised at how easily it seems at the time, and at how very tired one feels afterwards. As a mystery writer, I think I am a bit of an anomaly, since most mystery writers of the American school are only semi-literate, and I am not only literate but intellectual, much as I dislike the term. It would seem that a classical education might be a rather poor basis for writing novels in a hardboiled vernacular. I happen to think otherwise. A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of. In this country the mystery writer is looked down on as sub-literary merely because he is a mystery writer, rather than for instance a writer of social significance twaddle. To a classicist – even a very rusty one – such an attitude is merely a parvenu insecurity. When people ask me, as they occasionally do, why I don't try my hand at a serious novel, I don't argue with them; I don't even ask them what they mean by a serious novel. It would be useless. They wouldn't know. The question is parrot-talk.

Reading over some of the above, I seem to detect a rather supercilious tone here and there. I am afraid this is not altogether admirable, but unfortunately it is true. It belongs. I am, as a matter of fact, rather a supercilious person in many ways.
*
Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives. It took a certain amount of effort to go to the movies. Somebody had to stay with the kids. You had to get the car out of the garage. That was hard work. And you had to drive and park. Sometimes you had to walk as far as half a block to the theater. Then people with big fat heads would sit in front of you and make you nervous . . . Radio was a lot better, but there wasn't anything to look at. Your gaze wandered around the room and you might start thinking of other things – things you didn't want to think about. You had to use a little imagination to build yourself a picture of what was going on just by the sound. But television's perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And  there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in poor man's nirvana. And if some nasty-minded person comes along and says you look more like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind . . . just who should one be mad at anyway? Did you think the advertising agencies created vulgarity and the moronic mind that accepts it? To me television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our civilization that never had any standard but the soft buck.

Letter to Gene Levitt,
who had been adapting Marlowe for the radio show, 22 November 1950.

I am only a very recent possessor of a television set. It is a very dangerous medium. And as for the commercials – well, I understand that the concoction of these is a business in itself, a business that makes prostitution or the drug traffic seem quite respectable. It was bad enough to have the sub-human hucksters controlling radio, but television does something to you which radio never did. It prevents you from forming any kind of a mental picture and forces you to look at a caricature instead.
*
Letter to Alfred Hitchcock,
6 December 1950.

In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train, and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay – for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity – in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments  on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing your mind about things that you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mess of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write – the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera . . .

I think you may be the sort of director who thinks that camera angles, stage business, and interesting bits of byplay will make up for any amount of implausibility in a basic story. And I think you are quite wrong. I also think that the fact that you may get away with it doesn't prove you are right, because there is a feeling about a picture that is solidly based which cannot be produced in any other way than by having it solidly based. A sow's ear will look like a sow's ear even if one hangs it on a wall in a frame and calls it French modern. As a friend and well-wisher, I urge you just once in your long and distinguished career . . . to get a sound and sinewy story into the script and to sacrifice no part of its soundness for an interesting camera shot. Sacrifice a camera shot if necessary. There's always another camera shot just as good. There is never another motivation just as good.
*
Letter to Edgar Carter,
who had been sent a letter by the British magazine Picture Post with some questions about Chandler, 5 February 1951.

The Picture Post is for people who move their lips when they read. Surely they can get anything they want from my English publisher, Jamie Hamilton, Ltd., 90 Great Russell Street, London, W.C.1. The questions you ask would seem to me to indicate the intellectual level of the editorial department of the Picture Post. Yes, I am exactly like the characters in my books. I am very tough and have been known to break a Vienna roll with my bare hands. I am very handsome, have a powerful physique, and change my shirt regularly every Monday morning. When resting between assignments I live in a French Provincial château off Mulholland Drive. It is a fairly small place of forty-eight rooms and fifty-nine baths. I dine off gold plate and prefer to be waited on by naked dancing girls. But of course there are times when I have to grow a beard and hold up in a Main Street flophouse, and there are other times when I am, although not by request, entertained in the drunk tank at the city jail. I have friends from all walks of life. Some are highly educated and some talk like Darryl Zanuck. I have fourteen telephones on my desk, including direct lines to New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Santa Rosa. My filing case opens out into a very convenient portable bar, and the bartender, who lives in the bottom drawer, is a midget named Harry Cohn. I am a heavy smoker and according to my mood I smoke tobacco, marijuana, corn silk, and dried tea leaves. I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. In my spare time I collect elephants.

*
I've known a number of these not-quite writers. No doubt you have also. But in your profession you would get away from them as fast as possible: whereas I've known several of them quite well. I have spent time and money on them and it's always wasted, because even if they make an occasional sale it turns out they have been traveling on someone else's gas. I guess these are the hardest cases, because they want so hard to be professionals that it doesn't take very much encouragement to make them think they are. I knew one who sold a short story (most of which, incidentally, I had written for him) to that semi-slick MacFadden publication that Fulton Oursler used to edit – I forget the name of it. Some cheap outfit bought the picture rights for five hundred bucks and made a very bad B picture with Sally Rand in it. This fellow thereupon got very drunk and went around snooting all his writer friends because they were working for the pulps. A couple of years later he sold a short story to a pulp magazine, and I think that is the total of his contribution to literature in a commercial sense. To hear this fellow and his wife discussing and analyzing stories was a revelation in how much it is possible to know about technique without being able to use any. If you have enough talent, you can get by after a fashion without guts; and if you have enough guts, you can also get by, after a fashion, without talent. But you certainly can't get by with neither. These not-quite writers are very tragic people and the more intelligent they are, the more tragic, because the step they can't take seems to them such a very small step, which in fact it is. And every successful or fairly successful writer knows, or should know, by what a narrow margin he himself was able to take that step. But if you can't take it, you can't. That's all there is to it.
*
I wouldn't say that I found Priestley tactless, and I certainly haven't any quarrel with him. He plays the part of the blunt-spoken Yorkshireman very well. He was very pleasant to me and went out of his way to be complimentary. He is rugged, energetic, versatile, and in a way very professional; this is, everything that comes his way will be material and most of the material will be used rather quickly and superficially. His social philosophy is a little too rigid for my taste and a little too much conditioned by the fact that he finds it impossible to see much good in anyone who has made a lot of money (except by writing of course), anyone who has a public school accent or a military bearing, anyone in short who has a speech or mannerisms above the level of the lower middle class. I think this must be a great handicap to him, because in his world a gentleman of property is automatically a villain. That's a rather limiting viewpoint, and I would say that Priestley is rather a limited man . . . Of course I don't like socialism, although a modified form of it is inevitable everywhere. I think a bunch of bureaucrats can abuse the power of money just as ruthlessly as a bunch of Wall Street bankers, and far less competently. Socialism so far has existed largely on the fat of the class it is trying to impoverish. What happens when all that fat is used up?
*
I had a friendly note from Priestley, flawlessly typed on Gracie Fields’ stationery. I hear she is giving up California and going to live in Capri. She seems to feel about Los Angeles very much as I do: that it has become a grotesque and impossible place for a human being to live in. Priestley left me with one uncomfortable and probably exaggerated idea, but it is one in which he seems to believe implicitly. He thinks the entertainment world in England and the literary world for that matter, at least from the critical side (stage, films, radio, television, reviewing, etc.) is completely dominated by homosexuals, and that a good fifty per cent of the people active in this area are homosexuals; including, he says,  practically all the literary critics . . . He also mentioned several rather distinguished writers as pansies, whom I had never thought of in that way. And when I said, ‘Well, if there are so many of them, why doesn't somebody write a really good novel about it?’ He mentioned the name of a very distinguished novelist, a notorious case according to him, and said that he had retired from publication for several years and written a long novel about homosexualism from the inside by an expert, but that nobody would publish it. Well, well. These are dangerous thoughts to implant in a young and impressionable mind like mine. Now, every time I read one of these flossy and perceptive book reviewers, I say to myself, ‘Well, is he, or isn't he?’ And by God, about three quarters of the time I am beginning to think he is. The Saturday Review of Literature published an article a couple of weeks ago about twelve new and presumably promising novelists of 1950, together with their photographs. There were only three whom, on their physiognomy, I would definitely pass as male. From now on I'll be looking for them under the bed like an old maid looking for burglars. Maybe I ought to try an article for the Atlantic on the subject. I should call it, ‘You Too Could Be A Pansy'; or perhaps simply, ‘Homo Sapiens’.
*
Letter to Mr Inglis,
a fan, October 1951. Inglis had written to Chandler. At one point in his letter he speculated that, to a psychologist, Philip Marlowe might appear emotionally immature.

I'm afraid I can't give you much of an argument about your concept of what you call maturity . . . It may be that your ‘advanced psychology student’ friend was pulling your leg a little, or it may be that the advanced psychology itself has got him into a state of confusion in which he will probably remain for the rest of his life. We seem to be somewhat over supplied with psychologists nowadays, but I suppose that is natural enough, since their jargon, tiresome as it is to me personally, seems to have the same attraction for muddled minds that theological hair-splitting had for people of a former age. If being in revolt against a corrupt society constitutes being immature, then Philip Marlowe is extremely immature. If seeing dirt where there is dirt constitutes an inadequate social adjustment, then Philip Marlowe has an inadequate social adjustment. Of course, Marlowe is a failure and knows it. He is a failure because he hasn't any money. A man who without physical handicaps cannot make a decent living is always a failure and usually a moral failure. But a lot of very good men have been failures because their particular talents did not suit their time and place. In the long run I guess we are all failures or we wouldn't have the kind of world we have. I think I resent your suggestion that Philip Marlowe has contempt for other people's physical weakness. I don't know where you got that idea, and I don't think it's so. I am also a  little tired of the numerous suggestions that have been made that he's always full of whisky. The only point I can see in justification of that is that when he wants a drink he takes it openly and doesn't hesitate to remark on it. I don't know how it is in your part of the country, but compared with the country-club set in my part of the country he is as sober as a deacon.

*
Letter to Paul McClung,
11 December 1951. McClung, Chandler's paperback publisher, had written to Chandler about a line in one of his novels where he implied having been told, by a doctor, that alcoholism was incurable.

The doctor on whose point of view I founded the opinion you quote has been dead for several years. In any case I doubt very much whether he would have appreciated my revealing his identity to a magazine or a newspaper in connection with an opinion which his profession as a group would consider defeatist and most improper. I remember his saying to me in effect: ‘The toughest thing about trying to cure an alcoholic or a user of dope is that you have absolutely nothing to offer him in the long run. He feels awful at the moment no doubt; he feels shamed and humiliated; he would like to be cured of it if it is not too painful, and sometimes even if  it is, and it always is. In a purely physical sense you maybe say he is cured when his withdrawal symptoms have passed, and they can be pretty awful. But we forget pain, and to a certain extent we forget humiliation. So your alcoholic cured or your former dope addict looks around him, and what has he achieved? A flat landscape through which there is no road more interesting than another. His reward is negative. He doesn't suffer physically, and he is not humiliated or shamed mentally. He is merely damned dull.’ Obviously such a point of view is inconsistent with the Polyanna attitude we impose on the medical profession. They know better, but they have to live too, although there are times when in particular cases one doesn't quite see why.

I put my opinion, which you seem to have taken rather seriously, in the mouth of a crook. In times like these only a crook may safely express opinions of this sort. Any medical man of standing would have to add something like: ‘Of course with proper psychiatric treatment, blah, blah, blah –’ He would certainly have you on the upbeat. And by mentioning psychiatry he would, for me at least, instantly destroy the entire effect of any frank statement into which he may have ventured, since I regard psychiatry as fifty per cent bunk, thirty per cent fraud, ten per cent parrot talk, and the remaining ten per cent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read it.
*
I'm sending you today, probably by air express, a draft of a story which I have called The Long Goodbye. It runs 92,000 words. I'd be  happy to have your comments and objections and so on. I haven't even read the thing, except to make a few corrections and check a number of details that my secretary queried. So I am not sending you any opinion on the opus. You may find it slow going.

It has been clear to me for some time that what is largely boring about mystery stories, at least on a literate plane, is that the characters get lost about a third of the way through. Often the opening, the mise en scène, the establishment of the background, is very good. Then the plot thickens and the people become mere names. Well, what can you do to avoid this? You can write constant action and that is fine if you really enjoy it. But alas, one grows up, one becomes complicated and unsure, one becomes interested in moral dilemmas, rather than who cracked who on the head. And at that point one should retire and leave the field to younger and more simple men.

Anyhow I wrote this as I wanted to because I can do that now. I didn't care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about this strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tries to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish. Enough of that. There are more practical reasons. You write in a style that has been imitated, even plagiarized, to the point where you begin to look as if you were imitating your imitators. So you have to go where they can't follow you . . .
*
One of the weird problems of our times is the juvenile delinquent. Gangs of young crooks pop up in the most exclusive neighborhoods. Atlanta, Georgia, had a wave of burglaries and vandalism and it was traced to the young of some of the wealthiest families in the city. Our local high school (realschule or grammar school) had a Thieves Club among the children of the best families. The wars  have a lot to do with it, no doubt, but much of it would have happened anyway. There is no discipline in the schools because there is no means of enforcing it. And in the homes parents argue with their children, they don't tell them. If I had children, and thank God I never had any, I should send them abroad to school. American schools are rotten, especially in California. If your boy won't behave himself, you can try a military school where he will be taught to behave himself (or expelled), but he won't learn anything else. You can send him to one of the New England snob schools like Groton, if you can afford it but unless you are well off it is not always the kind thing to do. He will meet boys who drive Jaguars and Rileys and have too much spending money and he will feel inferior. Or you can send him to a Jesuit school, regardless of religion. The public schools are trash. About all they learn there is the increasingly simple art of seduction. One of my wife's nephews graduated from high school with the mental equipment of the Lower Fourth, say the middle third of that form. But he has turned out very well. He couldn't have got into a state university, much less a place like Stanford or Pomona, but he faced the problem of earning without any trouble at all. I find that curious, and very American. He did fourteen months in Korea without the trace of old soldier nonsense about him, he is married, and he is very scrupulous about money.
*
Report in the Hollywood Citizen-News, 24 February 1955: ‘Raymond Chandler, widely known mystery writer, today was released from the psychopathic ward at San Diego County Hospital where he was taken to hospital following an apparent suicide attempt. Police said Chandler had been drinking heavily since the death of his wife in December.‘

Letter to Roger Machell,
5 March 1955.
Everything is all right with me, or as near as one could hope for. I couldn't for the life of me tell you whether I really intended to go through with it or whether my subconscious was putting on a cheap dramatic performance. The first shot went off without my intending to. I had never fired the gun and the trigger pull was so  light that I barely touched it to get my hand in position when off she went and the bullet ricocheted around the tile walls of the shower and went up through the ceiling. It could just have easily have ricocheted into my stomach. The charge seemed to me very weak. This was born out when the second shot (the business) didn't fire at all. The cartridges were about five years old and I guess in this climate the charge had decomposed. At that point I blacked out ... I don't know whether or not it is an emotional defect that I have absolutely no sense of guilt nor any embarrassment at meeting people in La Jolla who all know what happened. It was on the radio here. I had letters from all over the place, some kind and sympathetic, some scolding, some silly beyond belief. I had letters from police officers, active and retired, from two Intelligence officers, one in Tokyo and one in March Field, Riverside, and a letter from an active professional private eye in San Francisco. These letters all said two things: 1, they should have written to me long before because I hadn't known what my books meant to people, and 2, How in the name of wonder did a writer who had never been a cop come to know them so precisely and portray them so accurately. One man who had served 23 years on the Los Angeles Police said he could put an actual name to practically any cop I put in any of my stories. He seemed to think I must actually have known all these men. This sort of thing staggered me a little because I have always suspected that if a real live police officer or detective read a mystery, it would be just to sneer at it. Who was it – Stevenson possibly – who said, experience is largely a matter of intuition?

In England, I believe, and in some other places, including New York State, attempted suicide, or what looks like it, is a crime. In California it is not, but you do have to go through the observation ward at the County Hospital. With a more than able assist from a friend of mine who does a column in the San Diego paper, I talked myself out of it the next noon but on condition I went to a private sanatorium. This I did. I had more trouble talking myself out of that. I stuck it for six days and then got a feeling I was being strung along with half promises. At that point I announced that I was  going to discharge myself. Upheaval. This simply wasn't done. All right, I said, Tell me the law that keeps me here. There wasn't any and he knew it. So finally he conceded that I could leave any time I wished, but would I come to his office and talk to him. I said I would, not because I expected any good from it, but because it would make his case record look better, and in addition, if he was perfectly frank with me, I might be able to help him.

So I came home and since nothing has mattered to me about the whole business except that they shot me so full of dope to keep me tractable that I still have a little hangover from it. Isn't it amazing that people should sit around depressed and bored and miserable in those places, worried about their jobs and their families, longing to go home, subjected every day to Electrical Shock Treatments (they didn't dare try that on me) and in between insulin shock, worrying about the cost of it all and the feeling of being a prisoner, and yet not have the guts to get up and walk out? I suppose it is part of what's the matter with them. If they had more guts they wouldn't be there in the first place. But that's hardly an answer. If I had more guts I shouldn't have let despair and grief get me so far down that I did what I did. But when I found myself dealing with a lot of psychiatric claptrap and with a non-existent authority that tried to make me think it had power, I didn't find that it took any special daring to tell them all what I was going to do and to do it. And in the end strangely enough they almost seemed to like it. The head nurse kissed me and said I was the politest, the most considerate and co-operative and the most resilient patient they have ever had there, and God help any doctor who tried to make me do anything I wasn't convinced I ought to do. And so much for that.

Quotes from the book The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959