Please don’t think that I’m flat on my back or anything like that--by what I’ve said. I have been at the office every day and doing my regular work. It’s the steady and growing strain of it all that I feel--without relief or rest, and I don’t want to disregard too many red signals--at least with the obvious means we have of checking danger of this seriousness. I don’t want you to waste a lot of money by coming down here in the belief that I need bedside attention, I only want you to know the facts as they are. If I went I should certainly spend a week with you beforehand. But, of course, I’ll never consider living in Cleveland again permanently--no matter what happens. Write me soon what you think of my suggestions. I think we should certainly not let that island property slip away. It’s a clean home with beautiful surroundings and sunshine with quiet and tranquillity--compared to this metropolitan living with its fret and fever--it’s a paradise. 160: TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ _New York City_ _Oct. 26th, ’23_ Dear Stieglitz: I hardly know how to begin--such confusion reigns at present. It’s the usual state, however, with the additional complication that my nerves are a little frazzled. In fact they got so on edge writing that damned advertising under the pseudo-refined atmosphere of the office I was working in that I had to resign the other day to save my mind. I have the prospect of coming back after a six week’s vacation if I want to--but I don’t want to, and as things stand at present, haven’t got the money to carry me through the rest and contemplation that I need. Rather wound up, you see! Your mention of the “sky” pictures really excited me. The greatest beauty comes out of repose, and I knew that as certain disturbances settled (were fought through) you would recapture the basis (on a higher plane than ever) for new penetrations and syntheses of vision. I had hoped to go down to a plantation that my grandmother and mother own in the West Indies this winter, in fact that was largely the basis of my leaving the job. My intention was to get the unbroken time there to write the essay on your work which I have never had the opportunity of doing here. I was also expecting to finish my _Bridge_ poem (which, done, would complete the material for my first book of poems). But these things must evidently wait. It is certain that they cannot be undertaken while my mind is divided between them and an office job. They are both of them too large conceptions to be accomplished under such tour de force conditions. Now, my mother writes me that the place may be sold at any time and that it is out of the question for me to go at all. _If_ I can get somebody to lend me the money, however, I may possibly go right ahead, regardless. Both of my parents are interested in money only in connection with my actions, and I have never been persistent enough in the past to really clear that notion away.