25 February 1935 – 3 March 1935

A very fine skyblue day, my windows completely filled with blue for a wonder. Mr. Riley has just mended them. And I have been writing and writing and rewriting the scene by the Round Pond. What I want to do is to reduce it all so that each sentence, though perfectly natural dialogue, has a great pressure of meaning behind it. And the most careful harmony and contrast of scene—the boats colliding etc.—has also to be arranged. Hence the extreme difficulty. But I hope perhaps tomorrow to have done, and then the dinner party and Kitty in the country should go quicker. At least I find the upper air scenes much simpler; and I think it’s right to keep them so. But Lord what a lot of work still to do! It won’t be done before August. And here I am plagued by the sudden wish to write an anti-Fascist pamphlet.

And I’ve just written it all over again. But it must do this time, I say to myself. Yet I know that I must put the screw on and write some pages again. It’s too jerky: too .* It’s obvious that one person sees one thing and another another; and that one has to draw them together. Who was it who said through the unconscious one comes to the conscious, and then again to the unconscious? I now feel a strong desire to stop reading F.Q.: to read Cicero’s letters, and the Chateaubriand Memoirs. As far as I can see, this is the natural swing of the pendulum. To particularise after the generalisation of romantic poetry.