Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. let men work and love and fight it off.

Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed.

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.

equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.

But night would come and with it the mountain moon and the lake would be moon - laned and I'd go out and sit in the grass and meditate facing west, wishing there were a Personal God in all this impersonal matter.

Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it. 'I love love,' she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that.