7 
San Francisco to Honolulu (Western Airlines) September 10, 1972 
"If a man is so unfortunate as to beg for food, give it to him and 
gain his gratitude. Never make him work for it and get his hatred." 
Henry Miller quoting Henry Miller in "Big Sur and the 
Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch" 
Steve Brown and I thrashed through a revision of the Paraguayan Indian 
and Chaco Mennonite blood group and serum factor genetics paper this morning, 
from 8 to 11 a.m. Although I felt captured and restive all the while, I 
was glad to get the work done and particularly happy to work creatively at 
something I know is valuable and rewarding, yet for which we can have no 
grandiose illusions. It is neither of vast importance or any real theoretical 
import... it can not make any great waves on the ocean of science. It is 
like doing competent, devoted, skilled and enthusiastic work on a minor 
miniature portrait of one whom one loves. Such work is refreshing. 
Linda, Bobby and Karl Lawrence saw me off at the San Francisco 
airport. We spent one hour at the Marin County's Sunday flea market before 
we took off for Golden Gate Bridge and the airport. 
I think of Reinhart Ruge and Yogi in Munich every time some new adverse 
comments on the Olympics reaches me. I have myself refused to follow them and 
fall heir to the faddism surrounding both the games and the Fischer-Spassky 
chess match. So much of our lives are now run by fad and instigated fashion 
that I find it salubrious to devote some energy to avoiding it, as avoiding 
mud puddles on a wet track. The book shops are almost gone from America; 
instead, a vaudeville-like display of current fads is before one. Even 
reputed "large" bookshops simply stacked by publishers' advertising campaigns, 
reviewers' reports and teachers' reading lists, now dump all stock that does 
not have a fast turnover. In this respect the fads of the past, as revealed 
by the titles on sale by the various private vendors at the flea market, 
correlate well with the age of the vendors who have come to divest themselves 
of their hoards. It is more interesting to so survey several periods of 
past fad than to be victim to the current one in a modern so-called book shop. 
I detect in Miller's doting book a bit of gloating tone I often note in 
myself. Its arrogance and self-satisfied blindness has the pathetic ring of 
one trying to convince himself. In the introductory essay, he extols Gerhart 
Muensch beyond all other of his visitors, and I am spellbound trying to re- 
member all I can of my evening in Gerharts 's bedroom, as he told me about the 
genius of Klee and introduced me to the whole problem of notation in modern 
music. Tepoztlan is a far cry from Big Sur. Muensch seems to have found his 
Big Sur in that "black" valley of the Aztec... his description of its terrors 
and its blackness and fascination will always be with me. Thus, I can see 
from his alcoholic retreat to his grand mansion and heavily walled garden in 
Tepoztlan a vastly different "solution" than the rugged American one of a 
Utopian "pioneer" community, which Miller is defending. The vastly different 
choice has been made by that one of his guests he respects most and extolls 
most lavishly. 
