“There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take up with rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well, even though they be far away--sometimes, indeed, though they be not born for thousands of years to come. I believe I speak but the strict truth when I claim that as there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none so lasting, none gentler, or more faithful; there is none which accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small cost of effort or anxiety.” --Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio. I ONCE knew a devout smoker who went to spend the winter in Havana and when he had got there and was unpacking his trunk he began to laugh, realizing suddenly that he had packed the trunk half full of boxes of cigars, and I have myself on more than one occasion when going from one city to another on some affair of business carried with me thousands of sheets of paper, fearing, I presume, that all the stationers in the new place had died. The fear of finding myself without paper, ink or pencils is a kind of disease with me and it is with a good deal of effort only that I restrain myself from stealing such articles whenever I am left unobserved in a store or in someone’s house. In houses where I live for some time I cache small stores of paper as a squirrel stores nuts and at one time in my life I had forcibly to be separated, by a considerate friend, from something like half a bushel of lead pencils I had for a long time carted about with me in a bag. There were enough pencils in the bag to have rewritten the history of mankind. To the writer of prose, who loves his craft, there is nothing in the world so satisfying as being in the presence of great stacks of clean white sheets. The feeling is indescribably sweet and cannot be compared with any reaction to be got from sheets on which one has already scribbled. The written sheets are already covered with one’s faults and oh, it is seldom indeed these sentences, scrawled across these sheets, can compare with what was intended! One has been walking in a street and has been much alive. What stories the faces in the streets tell! How significant the faces of the houses! The walls of the houses are brushed away by the force of the imagination and one sees and feels all of the life within. What a universal giving away of secrets! Everything is felt, everything known. Physical life within one’s own body comes to an end of consciousness. The life outside oneself is all, everything.