T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 242

- 8 - 6.XI.28 "Seven Pillars" was a historical necessity: I don't call it an option: but The Mint was a pure wantonness. I went to Uxbridge with the deliberate Intention of writing something about service life: and I put down those notes evening after evening in the hut, with the blankets up to my chin, writing on the support of my drawn-up knees. They are the perfect exemplar of journalism, in its antique sense: and it interests me very much to find that you and Garnett and Forster (three very different people) all see something in them. It shows that the daily record needn't be as transient as, for example, the Daily Mail. A fellow can't read (even at Miremanshah) a month-old Daily Mail." ......... "Anybody can catch the ugly to the life: but to make the smoothly beautiful at once beautiful and not sticky - aha, that's where the poet scores. ... A man's a great writer when he can use plain words, without baldness". .......... "Drill may be beautiful: but beauty is not perceptible when you are expecting a punishment every moment for not doing it well enough. Dancing is beautiful: - because it's the same sort of thing, without the sergeant-major in the "office"." 5.5.29 "I know by the best of all proof (contiguity with ordinary men in barracks) how ordinary I am; and because ordinariness is not wholly a flattering feeling, I have been led to look for my own likes in ordinary people: and from that I have grown to see the ordinariness in nearly everyone. But whereas that makes you rage and condemn, it makes me feel akin and friendly." ......... "It is humiliating to save someone's life at no risk to one's own". _____ 30.X.29 "The Mediterranean sounds good, but ... I wouldn't like it myself. Agreed that sunlight and sea are good things; but there's a streak of vulgarity in us which passionately enjoys English gutters and mud and winds and fire-sides. Pure Dickens, all of that, yet it makes me want to live in England for ever." . "I've got the toleration which comes from not caring very much about anything: whereas you people are always not about something." _____ 8/11/30 "The itch to write died in me many years ago, and I do not think it will revive. I hope not, for writing was a vexation and disappointment to me always, when I looked back on it." (undated) "Here it is wintry weather, and I am frozen and soaked, but interested. A job quite worth doing. Very difficult, engrossing and very exhausting." _____