September 24 Monday – At midnight in Etretat, France Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers. He’d made slow progress on JA over the past 27 days, though he’d lost about ten days “through head-fatigue and consequent incapacity.” He was nearing the end of Book II, and contemplated Book III, the last, would be difficult requiring a lot of time and painstaking work.

There isn’t anything to write, but to-morrow is mail-day, & I have been to bed & can’t get sleepy because I am all nerves & over-wrought & spiritually raw to the touch. And when it is mail-day & there isn’t anything to write, one would best get up & have a smoke & write it. It is thundering & lightening & raining, & it irritates me; & when it stops, that irritates me; & there is a clock downstairs which splits one’s ears when it strikes, & it takes four minutes to strike twelve, & then it rumbles its bowels & starts in & strikes it all over again — the most maddening devil of a clock that was ever devised. I would God I could afford it, I would build a fire in it. I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, & how another man could be found to lust after it & buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented — which is another riddle which tires me.

After all that, Sam admitted that the place in Etretat was “a kind of paradise…beautiful, and still, & infinitely restful” [MTHHR 77-8].

H.H. Rogers wrote to Sam, the letter now lost, but referred to in Sam’s Oct. 7 to Rogers.