I had a penchant for taking my own life rather seriously. Americans in general pretended their own lives did not matter. They were continually talking of devoting their lives to business, to some reform, to their children, to the public. I had been called a modern and perhaps only deserved the title inasmuch as I was a born questioner. I did not take such words people were always saying too seriously. Often enough I used to lie on my bed in my room and on moonlight nights I lit a cigarette and spent some time looking at myself. I lifted up my legs, one after the other, and rejoiced at the thought that they might yet take me into many strange places. Then I lifted my arms and looked long and earnestly at my hands. Why had they not served me better? Why would they not serve me better? It was easy enough to put a pen into the fingers. I myself was perfectly willing to be a great author. Why would not the pen slide more easily and gracefully over the paper? What sentences I wanted to write, what paragraphs, what pages! If reading Miss Stein had given me a new sense of my own limited vocabulary, had made me feel words as more living things, if seeing the work of many of the modern painters had given me a new feeling for form and color, why would my own hands not become better servants to me? On some nights, as I lay thus, the noise of the great city to which I had come growing fainter as the night wore on, I had many strange thoughts, brought into my head by reading the works of such men as Mr. Van Wyck Brooks or by talking with such men as my friends Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Rosenfeld. My own hands had not served me very well. Nothing they had done with words had satisfied me. There was not finesse enough in my fingers. All sorts of thoughts and emotions came to me that would not creep down my arms and out through my fingers upon the paper. How much was I to blame for that? How much could fairly be blamed to the civilization in which I had lived? I presume I wanted very much to blame something other than myself if I could.