Exhibit 1.5.25

First Cuts Are the Deepest

So I can't say I typically read a lot of essay collections--so maybe this is standard--but I've been running into this problem where the first essay is so good I don't want to go on.

From Didion's essay "The White Album":

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while.

And, the last line of which has become a kind of personal mantra, the end of James Baldwin's "Autobiographical Notes":

I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.