PERSONAL

PERSONAL

August 13, 1958

Mr. John S. Dickey, President
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire

Dear John:

I have delayed too long in replying to your very nice letters and to your suggestion that I might come to Dartmouth to work with you and Don on the draft of the Subpanel VI Report. Frankly, your invitation cost me a great deal of anguish. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to work with you and Don. On the other hand, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I must draw a line at some point, and that both for the sake of my own inward development and indeed for my health, I must stop the type of connection I have had with the Special Studies.

Few people will understand better than you what I have been through over the past few years. I still remember our conversation in the beginning of the Project when you tried in a very delicate fashion to point out to me some of the things that lay ahead. I am not sorry that I ignored your remarks. The Special Studies Project was a great experience. Its purposes have been noble ones. Many of them have been realised. My concern is that if I do not stop now, I will find myself drawn into an ever wider circle of activities in which I am always writing on topics which I have not fully considered, at a pace which is not my own and on a time limit which is imposed by events. It seems to me to be the duty of the intellectual at this moment not to water down his standards. No success will be able to compensate me for the conviction that in the deepest sense I am cheating.

If I start working on a report now, I will have the duty to see it through again. In fact, my difficulty is that once I have started working on it, no one will have to urge me to do that. The result will be several weeks of nerve-wracking, exhausting drafting sessions.

Nothing that I say indicates the slightest doubt about the merit of the Project as such. I am more than willing to comment on any draft that may be written, to attend meetings and to act generally as a consultant. In fact, I will be disappointed if I am not given this opportunity. On the other hand, I must break the pace which has for the past two years used up my intellectual capital without an