Since I came to this place I have been very restless wasting my energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of living and I have found myself with the teeming interests of the life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in my head. My mind has been full of confused protests and justifications. In any case I should have found difficulties enough in expressing the complex thing I have to tell but it has added greatly to my trouble that I have a great analogue that a certain Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at very much the age I have reached and wrote a book to engage the restlessness of his mind very much as I have wanted to do.
