Walter Morris is an exceedingly obscure author whom the Maverick Philosopher has decided to take under his wing and rescue from total oblivion. When I get through with him at least some excerpts from his journals will be in range of the search engines. Please contact me if you know anything about this fellow. He is the author of American in Search of a Way (Macmillan, 1942) and The Journal of a Discarded Man (Englewood, N.J.: Knabe-North Publishers, 1965). I have found nothing on the World Wide Web pertaining to either of these books apart from what I myself have posted. Luckily, the Arizona State University library contains a copy of his Notebook 2: Black River (limited edition, mimeographed, Englewood, NJ, 1949). It has been languishing in the ASU collection since 19 March 1956 on which date it was cataloged by one F. B. Morgan. I'd put money on the proposition that I am the only one ever to have read it.
All right Walter, with the MP as master of ceremonies, you are about to enter the 'sphere.
Walter Morris, Notebook 2: Black River, pp. 112-113, entry of 2 September 1945, Sunday:
. . . there are certain fundamental problems that beset anybody who hopes to do a little thinking and set words down on paper. The necessity of solitude is certainly one. For there can be no inner life worth mentioning when a man is constantly in company, day and night, and constantly distracted, interrupted and set upon by an endless flow of social obligations, community and family duties, economic brain-twisters and marital complexities. All of that goes with "normal" life — granted — but not for me, either, is the monk's life. I'm only saying that some solitude has to be snatched out of this welter if you want to get below the surface of things and come up with something worth having. When Rilke says that his inner life had been dislocated and that being alone provides "a kind of psychic plaster cast, in which something is healing," he is saying something that some people, no doubt, will find quite unintelligible — or tiresomely neurotic — and other will find keenly pointed and meaningful. If a person in the latter class allows himself to become submerged among people in the former, he will come to feel like a problem child in no time at all. When that tribe of happy, buzzing extroverts starts undermining his self-confidence and inflicting him with an inferiority complex, the quickest antidote is for him to withdraw to a quiet corner with some of the good books that have been produced during the past two thousand years. He'll see that he's a problem child, all right, but in the sense of being spiritually alive, not in the sense of being a freak. They were all problem children, the men who wrote those books. Those who weren't, either left nothing or perhaps made a contribution to engineering or military science . . . [ellipsis in original]