September 16, 1932

I am back at the job and after a year's absence [while attending grad school at the University of Illinois] as unsettled and unhappy as ever. I remember the day I lay under the big poplar in a cornfield a thousand miles south of here and thought if I could only be back with Luther and Dorothy, Wilson and Ed and Dick and Laura and the rest I would be perfectly happy, no matter what the circumstances. I would come back content to spend the rest of my life in this one place. Would buy a car, build a house, in other words get anything and everything I wanted, because my schooling days would be over. Well here I am and still I am unhappy. It seems that I do not know what I want, that no matter where I am, I am unhappy and discontented. I don't know what it is, but as Lib [Elizabeth] says, she has never seen me contented in any situation. Perhaps I will never be contented. I don't know. Well this much is certain, I am through going to school. I don't want my Doctor's degree, that will only mean getting into some University or College and there the grind will be exactly the same as ever. Would I trade places with Shelford or Zeleny or Cahn or any of the rest, I do not think so. My job here is as good as theirs, not counting the money. It is merely the combination of the two that hurts, the impossibility of getting away into the wilds for any extended periods. If I could cut loose in the summer time, it would be somewhat different but that seems impossible, just a continual rush all year long, twelve months at a time....

I think one solution is starting at my writing again, but what will it be. I am sick and tired of writing about hunting and fishing. That material is all repetition. I have written out the best I have in that line. It will have to be short sketches of things I have done and seen. It will have to be different. My little skiing jaunt which I wrote up at Champaign might work for one, short philosophick sketches or something of that order. Not the ducks of Low Lake, deer of the Stoney, fly fishing for northerns, leave that to someone else. If I could find my medium, which I have been feeling around for in my diary for years, I would be all right. The problem is to find that and then get to work on it....