This is a letter that I found interesting, from Benjamin Franklin to his parents, responding to his mother’s concern that he might be straying from the One True Faith.[Note: I added some paragraph breaks to make it more readable. Franklin was fond of paragraphs that ran a page or more.]

April 13, 1738

Honour’d Father and Mother

I have your Favor of the 21st of March in which you both seem concern’d lest I have imbib’d some erroneous Opinions. Doubtless I have my Share, and when the natural Weakness and Imperfection of Human Understanding is considered, with the unavoidable Influences of Education, Custom, Books and Company, upon our Ways of thinking, I imagine a Man must have a good deal of Vanity who believes, and a good deal of Boldness who affirms, that all the Doctrines he holds, are true; and all he rejects, are false. And perhaps the same may be justly said of every Sect, Church and Society of men which they assume to themselves the Infallibility which they deny to the Popes and Councils.I think Opinions should be judg’d of by by their Influences and Effects; and if a Man holds none that tend to make him less Virtuous or Vicious, it may be concluded he holds none that are dangerous; which I hope is the Case with me. I am sorry you should have any Uneasiness on my Account, and if it were a thing possible for one to alter his Opinions in order to please others, I know none whom I ought more willingly to oblige in that respect than yourselves: But since it is no more in a Man’s Power to think than to look like another, methinks all that should be expected from me is to keep my Mind open to Conviction, to hear patiently and examine attentively whatever is offered to me for that end; and if after all I continue in the same Errors, I believe your usual Charity will induce you rather to pity and excuse than blame me. In the mean time your Care and Concern for me is what I am very thankful for.As to the Freemasons, unless she will believe me when I assure her that they are in general a very harmless sort of People; and have no principles or Practices that are inconsistent with Religion or good Manners, I know no Way of giving my Mother a better Opinion of them than she seems to have at present (since it is not allow’d that Women should be admitted into that secret Society), She has, I must confess, on that Account, some reason to be displeas’d with it; but for any thing else, I must entreat her to suspend her Judgment till she is better inform’d, and in the mean time exercise her Charity.My Mother grieves that one of her Sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know; the Truth is, I make such Distinctions very little my Study; I think vital Religion has always suffer’d, when Orthodoxy is more regarded than Virtue. And the Scripture assures me, that at the last Day, we shall not be examin’d what we thought, but what we did; and our Recommendation will not be that we said Lord, Lord, but that we did GOOD to our Fellow Creatures. See Matth. 2[5].[Stuff about the weather and family follows.]I am Your dutiful SonBF

Here’s some consolation for The Wunderfool from a wildly successful novelist who lived for some time in Hollywood in the 1930s, getting paid $1,500 a week to tinker around with screenplays. He asked novelist Claude Houghton:

Have you ever done any picture work? It is quite interesting, but I hate
having to condense my dialogue as one has to do. I can’t seem to get used to
writing a couple of lines for a scene between two characers, where in a novel
you would be able to extend yourself to a page or so.

Having spent the last three years trying to make the transition from novels to screenplays, I can confess that it is painful.

Here’s an incisive quote from Anton Chekhov as related in Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount, Jr.

Very well, then, I shall marry . . . But under the following conditions:
everything must continue as it was before, in other words, she must live in
Moscow and I in the country, and I’ll go visit her. I will never be able to
stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one
morning to the next. Whenever someone talks to me day after day about the same
thing in the same tone of voice, it brings out the ferocity in me . . . I
promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does
not appear in my sky every day. I won’t write any better for having gotten
married.

Don’t show this to The Woman!

Monsignor Quixote, Graham GreeneAnother book I read (or in this case, re-read) while writing Escape From Fred. Once you’ve read it, you can see how this book might have informed it. Greene was my favorite author until I discovered Robertson Davies.p. 55. It’s odd how sharing a sense of doubt can bring two men together perhaps even more that sharing a faith. The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.