August 16th, 1973

[continued]

I have traveled in the company of friends whom I respect deeply. A small group of people whose lives and thoughts and experiences has greatly affected my own. I can name the group: Ross, Karen, Nancy, Margie, Gayle, Peggy, Ed, Dick, Dave, Melinda, Evelyn. This group has been the core of a circle of mutual experiences and exchanges that has fed, nourished and developed me.

I consider all these people to be intellectuals– I am aware of the differences between them and other people and yet I cannot define the term intellectual. People whose lives are basically a learning process. The specifics of their experiences– the hassles, the conflicts, the problems,– are subordinated to a larger pattern of learning. They are not removed from involvement in their own experiences– they feel and hurt and “cry real tears”– but there is an intellectual cohesiveness to their lives– a continuity– that creates a certain dramatic validity to the content of their lives– Like Allen bearing me new “chapters” of his life–

Richard (and his type–) are more like soap opera characters scrambling from one daily episode to the next. 

I do not condemn this– he is like my mother, my family–

I am not saying I think he (they) are wrong or unenlightened–  I am simply stating that there are differences in human beings’ approach to and interpretation of life and only for lack of more precise verbal apparatus I must name them intellectual and non-intellectual.

Why Richard? Why have I chosen Richard as an individual to share my life? Richard as just another adventure that got carried too far? Richard as a surrogate daddy? Richard as a means to get that home I’ve always seemed to need? Why Richard?