When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction - than to lose it in slumber.

What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many…?

I said: I must remember this, being small.

To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.