And so it often happens. Thought depends upon language, for we think with words, and language is a social thing. Language is conversation. And thought itself is therefore social. The only clear thought is transmissible thought. If anyone tells you that he sees a thing quite clearly but that he does not know how to communicate it, you may reply that he cannot be sure whether he sees it clearly or not. To every writer it has happened more than once that he has realized the absurdity or obscurity of his own thought only after he has seen it in print. Be assured, then, that you meditate more and meditate better when you are writing things like this letter that you are now addressing to yourself than when you shut yourself up in your room to devote yourself to what is called meditation and what is really only mind-wandering. The necessity of giving your thought transmissible expression is that which makes it a living and effective process. It is when your pen is in your hand that things occur to you most readily, and the reason is because then you are not thinking for yourself but thinking for others. Thinking for oneself is not properly thinking--it is losing oneself in vague reveries, like a man on the verge of sleep idly watching the drift of his cigar-smoke. To think is to think for others; thinking is a social function. You have sometimes heard it said that Paul of Tarsus used to draw inspiration from his own words, that these words provoked ideas, and that in his epistles it is possible to follow this process of ideation by means of verbal associations. And of Augustine of Hippo--one of the immortal pillars, like Paul, Bernard and Martin Luther, of the Christianity of the heart--it has been said that he developed his theme by antitheses, that is to say rhetorically. And both Paul and Augustine were men of burning passion, not solitary contemplatives, but active fighters. They consider you to be an egotist because you often refer to yourself--you are doing it now in this soliloquy--and talk about yourself, but the truth is that this self of yours, in so far as you are a writer, is something that belongs to all the world--you stand in the middle of the street, hailed by everybody and answering back. You would be not merely an egotist but a miserable egoist if you shut yourself up in the tower of ivory, far from your fellows, and worked day after day upon some minute and exquisite jewel. You work in the open air, in the public gaze, and from time to time, in order to keep your work clean, you blow away the dust of the turmoil that has settled upon it. Enough. Let us talk no more together, you and I, this hidden and intimate self and this apparent and public self. Are they really two? Are you anything else but a writer? Or rather, this self that is not the publicist, of what worth is it? II