Monday July 26.

---Couldn't work tonight because of a thousand quivering passions. I love, love. Someday my wife and I shall go to the rug in the bedroom, every night, and kneel, facing each other, and embrace and kiss, and she'll say, "Because we'll never part," and I will say "Because we'll never part," --and then we'll get up and resume. This is a frenzy, this love. Every night the rug, or all is lost. The most beautiful love there ever was. To say, then, that I can't work because of love, no, no --all my sweating work and suffering was work for love itself, --and all my future work, my future music. It is all love, "The Town & The City", and I mean the love of a girl. It was the labor of attaining a soul which a girl whom I would love could never leave ... God, god, I'm blind, the sentence is mad. Again: -- it was the labour of attaining a soul that my love could never hate, and will never hate. My "rain" chapter is such beauty that no love of mine can ever and will ever stop loving me. This is how work is love. She has to love me because I am so full of beauty and the work of love. And til I die, too ... Is this not so? "Is this not great gentility?" -- Could I ever hate Melville or Dostoevsky or Wolfe? Then can she ever hate me? Can I hate Shakespeare? Can I but love Twain? Can I do anything but adore Dostoevsky? ... and feel eternal affection for Balzac? -- for Celine? Can she but love me? Will I not in-fold her in my arms as we ride on a bus across Nevada and explain my vision of Nevada to her? Won't I write "I Love You" on the back of the check in a restaurant and show it to her? What will my soul do when she wipes her tears? In slacks or new-look ballerina gown she'll come tripping down the street to me. In the fog we'll walk hand in hand up the steep white streets of San Francisco, with a bottle of Tokay, and "The Encantadas" in my back pocket. I'll take her with me across the sky-nights and to Paris and to my ranch. She'll kiss the horse on its silky brow, and brood. Because she is mine, mine, and because we'll never part, and we'll kneel on the rug, and have children, and all because work is love, love's words, the vision of love, -- and tonight I quiver -- ONE FLOWER.

A journal entry, Jack Kerouac.