determination. She marched into my room swinging her stick . . . but
no--I mustn't exaggerate. It is not my speciality. I am not a humoristic
writer. In all soberness, then, all I am certain of is that she had a
stick to swing.

No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. The window was open; the door too
stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm, still sunshine of
the wide fields. They lay around me infinitely helpful, but truth to
say I had not known for weeks whether the sun shone upon the earth and
whether the stars above still moved on their appointed courses. I was
just then giving up some days of my allotted span to the last chapters
of the novel "Nostromo," a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard,
which is still mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in
connection with the word "failure" and sometimes in conjunction with the
word "astonishing." I have no opinion on this discrepancy. It's the sort
of difference that can never be settled. All I know is that, for twenty
months, neglecting the common joys of life that fall to the lot of the
humblest on this earth, I had, like the prophet of old, "wrestled with
the Lord" for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the
darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the
sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes
of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are,
perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterise otherwise the
intimacy and the strain of a creative effort in which mind and will and
conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day,
away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really
lovable and gentle--something for which a material parallel can only be
found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage
round Cape Horn. For that too is the wrestling of men with the might
of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world, without the