The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.

It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.

But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.