It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in creating a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I am a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don't enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.

1+1=3 ... The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it's hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don't come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It's the essential equation of love, art, rock'n'roll and rock'n'roll bands. It's the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock'n'roll will never die.

And often we can’t feel the sense of the divine, because we don’t let ourselves alone. I believe in the spirituality of radical non-self interference. And if we can just let ourselves be, then we will find that in that act of acceptance that there is something really subversive. There is nothing as radical and as subversive as an act of acceptance.

"You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?”
“What is it, then?”
“The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. [...]You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers. You know what that is; I don’t have to tell you.”
He didn’t have to tell me. Brother David knew I wanted my work to be my poetry.
“Go on,” I said.
“You are like Rilke’s Swan in his awkward waddling across the ground; the swan doesn’t cure his awkwardness by beating himself on the back, by moving faster, or by trying to organize himself better. He does it by moving toward the elemental water where he belongs. It is the simple contact with the water that gives him grace and presence. You only have to touch the elemental waters in your own life, and it will transform everything. But you have to let yourself down into those waters from the ground on which you stand, and that can be hard. Particularly if you think you might drown.”

But why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with my payload.

Whether your novel is publishable is, for you, an imponderable, so my advice is to avoid the occasion of sin and try to put this question out of your mind. You have made your commitment; now make the most of it. You will also try to decide whether it is good. Let me answer that for you--it is, but it can be better, and your job in rewriting is to make it better. "Better" is not a global trait, but a group of specific qualities you can work toward one by one, knowing that they work ecologically--as you make one better, it might get out of balance with the others, but it also might make the others better. Every novel is a system. Sometimes the system looks out of balance, sometimes the system looks in balance but rather shallow, sometimes a small change balances the whole system and everything gets better and deeper.