8 February 1932 – 14 February 1932

Why did I ever say I would produce another volume of Common Reader? It will take me week after week, month after month. However a year spent—save for diversions in Greece and Russia—in reading through English literature will no doubt do good to my fictitious brain. Rest it anyhow. One day, all of a rush, fiction will burst in. These remarks are jotted down at the end of a long morning’s work on Donne, which will have to be done again, and is it worth the doing? I wake in the night with the sense of being in an empty hall: Lytton dead and those factories building. What is the point of it—life—when I am not working—suddenly becomes thin, indifferent. Lytton is dead, and nothing definite to mark it. Also they write flimsy articles about him.