And a Letter

Abstract

Three months and a day ago I started the first typing of this — this work, this book, I embarked on this voyage, this venture, and I’ve just finished reading the seventh meeting of the York seminar: I cannot, or should not excerpt it but bring it whole; if I remove unfinished sentences, the opacity, and the repetitions, it will be as tightly colored a mosaic, as sharply articulated a crystallery (if I may say so) as I said of the 1964–65 tutorial. I thus would have to go over the 48 pages of the transcript (one of the longer ones) and do the removing I just mentioned to make it shine (shine forth). Then I would have to have a photocopy made (because I am making two copies of the whole manuscript of this enterprise), and this would be too heavy to take along home: we’re leaving in a week. Thus I have accepted the appropriateness of interruption until I can take up the task again at home, although I don’t know yet quite how soon that will be possible, what the circumstances are. I’ll send the transcripts of the first five meetings home and take those of the remaining 11 — some 500 pages — with me for fear they might get lost. I am sad, of course, that I have not been able to finish this first draft during my semester off.