This is the kind of book that grows on you in days not minutes; this is the kind of book that you remember like you remember war or birth or love or fire, this singing in my darkest dark—the photo of Buk with cigarette, everything, everything, there is no beginning, I don’t know where to touch the book next—first I think the jacket is impossibly impossibly true, then I go elsewhere, it’s like walking through a forest with wine at high noon and everything gone except the soaring. my god, you’ve done it, you’ve done it! Never such a book! Where? Where?? in all the libraries, in all the cities I have never seen such a book put together in such a way, inventive creativeness and love. Where have the publishers been for centuries? You’ve done it.

you’ve done it.

The books will sit and grow on me, they will enter me, it is a part, a beholden and miraculous part. It does little to say more: the whole thing wells and turns in me almost impossibly. My thanks my thanks for all the love and honor and pain and beauty; the pain yours, the others you’ve passed to me. Going now, going.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 26, 1963

Sitting here smoking a ¼ last night’s cigar and savoring the book—as I will always savor it, it is endless with endless little touches, and looking at the jacket now—the way it works around the cover, the marble paper over our sandman skeleton, and do thank (for me) Chevrier and Salantrie for their fine work. The jacket I cannot figure out, how it has this antique quality and I do not figure it out, it would be like tearing a rose, formulas do not interest me, it is the thing being there like the sun that warms me. I do not think there will ever be another event in my life like this book, and I keep thinking of the years drunk in the alleys, of the 3 years I sat in the same Philly bar on the same barstool from 6 or 7 a.m. in the morning until 2 a.m. the next morning, staring down at the wood, listening to nothing, maybe, and now7 this book, this book, this book out of nothing like somebody saying, see, it is not nearly all bad. I know how close you must come to dying in fighting from all nothingness of poverty, hoping on luck, a break from the sky, kinder landlords, praying typefaces do not break, that somebody will send a dollar for paper, that somebody will buy a postcard or a painting from Gypsy, that the body will hold up, that the landlord will smile, that cars will not run you over, everything everything, so please do not say that your blood is “more like the pseudo-stuff that bleeds from the madras tissue between pages 96 and 97.” I know better and the living people of the world know better. Don’t make me sad; the miracle is yours; you have drowned me in honor, and no matter what cheap hotel, what jail, what grave is there for me, they can never take away the miracle.