Across the Spectrum:The Interdisciplinary Life and Letters of John G. Neihardt (‘Flaming Rainbow’)

Your comment on my inconsistency is correct and well taken. Love is a value, and I myself am more than half convinced that it is the pivotal value. But I maintain that if this that we experience with the senses is the whole show, so far as we are concerned, then love is no more than a particularly pleasant tickle. But I know better when I am wisest. I know, or seem to know, that all this is idiotic only because it is fragmentary, and that life is immense and more than the senses may know. When I wrote "endless love", I meant endless so far as my ending of it is concerned.

Your last number is truly a corker. I am very happy over your success with the magazine, and I know that it is worth doing - truly so. Don't use anything of mine because it is mine. You are welcome to any of the stuff I sent, but use only what you want. I am beyond caring to have things printed.

I do serve in this job, though sometimes I can't see how. But I do have influence, and it grows surprisingly. Perhaps it has been right that I should toil in this mill, though when I see so many hundreds of books that are worthless - and my cycle unfinished - I sometimes grieve. But at other times I seem to know that almost everything here but sympathy for fellow sufferers is a false alarm.

I have recently become friendly with Dr. Boris Sokoloff who was associated with Kerensky in the Russian Revolution, and helped to draft the first Russian Constitution after the overthrow of the Czar. He has been in America only 11 months and speaks English with great difficulty, but he is a very distinguished biologist and was brought over here by the Rockefeller Institute from the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

He told me some things about his connections with Kerensky, but very little. I have lately read more of him, and his adventures after the overthrow of Kerensky were all but incredible. He is a very lonely man and told me that he found it very difficult to make human contact in America. I like him and he likes me, I feel sure. I am going to have him out at my house overnight next week-end. Such spirits mean something, and I feel richer every time I get an unusual person under my roof.