Been slowed down in my reading...

but primarily I have been rereading Hershel Parker's foreword to his "Kraken" edition of Pierre. There is a story here that I find compelling. Here is a man (Melville) driven to the brink of pure creation on the heels of Moby-Dick, but is also in near servitude having to pay back debts.

The letter to Hawthorne spills out the purity of his intent, where his mind was at and how it ultimately did not mesh well with the marketplace. His letter to Hawthorne in June 1851 is premonitious of where the direction of his life and art were going... nowhere, at least in his lifetime:

“I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now. My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”