.MTM4OA.MTE5MDU3

Blake ?603-E32 Dec. 2.54 all I said was some thing about "A Loaf, a Door". and this is what I get back. O Tempora! O Mores!

Dear Lorraine,

   The note of wistful nostalgia in your last letter touched and distressed me.  For some reason, (and it has always been thus) my own mild and chronic unease bothers me less than the thought that you should be unhappy.  You've always been, at least to me, a person of vast reserve and taciturnity, and if you ever chose to show any degree of emotion, it always seemed to me a studied parody of what you were really feeling - only when you were gay did the mood seem to ring true, it would have been impossible to simulate the bubbling delight you felt.  Perhaps it seemed so rich because it was so rare.  So much of  you has always  been in a minor key.  So much careful darkness that the flashes of light were revelations - ah well,  as always when I try to say what I deeply feel, I flounder.  Besides, I was never permitted truly to know you, and the accrued curiosity has become mountainous.  Some day perhaps I shall be allowed to prospect your psyche, sinking shafts to see what I can strike in that fabulous field.
  But before I get utterly lost in the Outer Imponderables, I want to say that I too have occasionally thought back to those purple days and crimson nights in Chicago - not with nostalgia, but with a sense of awe and wonder that it didn't kill us all.  Law, such excesses, and blind fevered excursions into nowhere.  Many laughs, but it was bitter, doomed laughter, and I might have enjoyed every