And day by day, as he sat there in the sun, glorifying, page by page, the high qualities of these men, their courage and their truth and straightness, he was conscious distantly of the strange contradiction between what he was doing and what he was. He stopped sometimes and thought, “This is sincere work that I am doing; I mean it; it excites me; the critics, whatever they say, will say that it is sincere and noble writing. Parents in the days to come may make their children read it as an exhortation to manliness and truth. They may even say that I was a noble character myself.⁠ ⁠… And all the time I am doing a mean and dirty thing⁠—a cowardly thing. And I don’t care. My life is a lie, and this poem is a lie, but I don’t care; it is good work.”

All that June