Excerpts from Journals 1941

“I feel as if I had been exhiled from our era, this is Tahiti in the form of a big city: at this very moment I am looking out on to a little garden with a lawn, shrubs with red blossom, a palm tree and white garden furniture, and a male voice is singing something sentimental to piano accompaniment — it’s not a wireless, they have nature here, indeed, since everything is so artificial, they even have an exaggerated feeling for nature, which becomes alienated, from Dieterle’s house you can see the San Fernando Valley: an incessant, brilliantly illuminated stream of cars thunders through nature; but they tell you that all the greenery is wrested from the desert by irrigation systems.  Scratch the surface a little and the desert shows through: stop paying the water bills and everything stops blooming: the butchery 15,000 kilometres away, which is deciding our fate right across Europe at its broadest point, is only an echo in the hubbub of the art-market here.”

“…this masoleum of easy going…”

“They really are nomads, they change professions like shoes, build houses to last 20 years and don’t stay that long, so that home isn’t any specific locality.  Not for nothing has the great disorder spread so luxuriantly here.”

“…the delicacy of the upstarts…”

“Oh course the soil here is not conducive to developing talent.”