Status Updates From The Golden Notebook

people everywhere are trying not to feel. Cool, cool, cool, that's the word. That's the banner. From America first, but now us. I think of the groups of young people, political and social around London [...] the new socialists--that's what they have in common, a quality of measured emotion, coolness. In a world as terrible as this, limit emotion.

He suggested I should do a play based on [my novel]. A play which should take no sides but emphasize the essential tragedy of the colonial situation the tragedy of the whites. It is true, of course, what is poverty, what are hunger, malnutrition, homelessness, the pedestrian degradations (his word [...]) compared to the reality, the human reality of the white dilemma?