CALENDAR     

November 15, 1962 Princeton, 2 A.M.

Only in the middle of the night could I imagine that I have time to carry on my journal. It is not since Spring that I have written here regularly. I tell myself I have written much elsewhere, countless inconsequential letters, several pieces for the omnivorous American Behavioral Scientist, two chapters for the second edition of the Elements of Political Science which is to come out as a paperback in April as Politics and Government, and odds and ends. Much of my time has been spent on business, the unrewarding grinding away of energies in trying to interest others in financing the magazine and movies and the tending to the fiscal and administrative problems of all the work. The new format of the ABS, begun in September, proved to be demanding also, and without Ted's half-time energies, I must do much more of the magazine myself. I have spent 2/3 of my money on these activities, with small hope of return. Melvin was a trial of nerves.

But since his departure for Paris on September 28, life has been more pleasant. He was exhausting, with his small needs, rides, ideas, pieces of advice, a record, an introduction, bills to be paid, petty cash needs, calls at odd hours, arguments, forgetfulness to be prodded and a merry-go-round of new faces in and out of the 16th Street office-apartment, black and white, attractive for the most part but half-baked, a disastrous coterie for a man with work to do.

My family is well.

My parents are well.

My brothers are well, and their families too.

Everyone is up to something.

Many things have happened but I suppose none have been of fundamental importance. No great change. I can begin again now, if I will, on this fragrant, wet, balmy fall morning that is like Spring, with the same structure as I left off with. Only life has passed, a lot of it, tons of ideas, words, impressions, feelings, touchings, actions -- none to be ever truly recalled, the good gone with the bad, seven beautiful children grown by six months. What an immense beauty drifted into eternity? A great soft Law that makes a hard little pygmy of the entropic 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: that material dissipates into cold; the universe cools, life slows. How trivial a part of the universe of cool formed from the moments, after every departed experience!

November 28, 1962 Princeton 9 AM

Our little expedition returned at seven last evening, after having traveled by way of White River Junction, Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and the Washington Bridge. The boys were full of enthusiastic talk of the country.

This morning face to face with work, but what work! Loose-ends, fragments. How nice it would be to face only one formidable task day-in and day-out!

We should form an Association for Public Opposition. This group would collect and spend funds to advertise against advertising, broadcast against bad broadcasting, argue against alcoholism as the posters do in France, urge good taste and good habit, present an anti-establishment report for all establishment reports, out-pronounce the pronunciamentos, place tribunes in every agency of government to [usually] report on the possibilities of its dissolution or diminution, explode fads, test products (by aid to Consumers' Research), do all that the naive have always thought governments capable of doing.