Chapter 31 - "The Tragedy Of My Work": Part 5 - Pressed for Time

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Every so often, Alfred would apologize/complain to one or another of his friends about the slowness with which the book was coming along. He felt a time pressure to finish it. Even his time spent working at the hospital, as necessary as it may have been for the development of his work, had seemed to him like a diversion from writing. By the fall of 1926, he was ready to leave St. Elizabeths and devote himself full-time to getting the book done. 

Part of the time pressure he felt involved a pull to get back to Poland. He had been gone now for over 10 years. His mother would write from Warsaw and complain. Family business never seemed to be going well. Although he and Mira would send money, it seemed nothing much was going to get straightened out until he got back home.

On the other hand he didn’t look forward to dealing with his mother on a daily basis. Also since he was formulating and writing in English and had developed a network of interested and helpful friends in the United States, he felt he had to stay in the U.S. until he finished the book. He hoped he could get it done soon. But it had become apparent; the process was simply going to take longer than the impatient part of him demanded. In the meantime, he was suspended between the U.S. and Poland.

Early in October, he went to Philadelphia for a few days to meet Mira, who was finally coming home to him after a summer of painting commissions in Massachusetts. They were planning to wrap things up in Washington over the next few months. They held the lease for the apartment in Brooklyn where Mira’s sister Minnie had been living. Minnie was going to stay with sister Amy at her farm near Kansas City. Alfred and Mira intended to move into the Brooklyn place sometime in December or, at the latest, in January 1927.

Meanwhile, just after the second Time-Binding paper came out at the end of October, Alfred went on a quick speaking trip to the Midwest. Ethel Dummer, a wealthy Chicago/San Diego philanthropist and child welfare advocate, had gotten interested in his work and put him in touch with psychologist L. L. Thurstone, who arranged a talk for him at the University of Chicago. Although he had a small audience, Alfred was happy to meet Thurstone and, probably even more so to meet neurologist C. Judson Herrick, whose writings he had just gotten interested in, and who attended his talk. Alfred would describe Herrick’s work as a “non-aristotelian neurology”. He would find in Herrick’s writings some plausible mechanisms for the different forms of abstracting behavior he wanted to understand better from a neurological point of view. From Chicago, Alfred went to Detroit to give a talk sponsored by the Association of Polish Engineers of America. The high point there was meeting in the audience a boyhood friend from Poland whom he hadn’t seen in 20 years. Afterwards he went to Ann Arbor for a few days to see Rainich and give a lecture before taking a train back to Washington and Mira. He considered his two-week trip a success. Many of the academics he met had wanted a copy of his latest paper and he began corresponding with Herrick, who eventually became one of the scientists who corrected his book manuscript.

Alfred had lined up a few presentations to psychiatric and educational groups around Washington for late November and early December. Then the couple would move to Brooklyn, where they planned to stay until he finished the book—soon, he hoped. And then what? Sometimes, considering the obstacles in the way, he had thought he might just finish the book and be done with the whole business, just go off somewhere exotic with Mira, say Africa, Japan, India, or China. He had talked with Mira about it and already made some inquiries about teaching possibilities in the Orient, a long route back to Poland. Alternatively, the possibilities of developing the General Theory of Time-Binding further in the U.S., or elsewhere, was dependent on getting enough people interested in applying the apparently easy-to-grasp and difficult-to-practice theory. He had severe doubts whether he and Mira would be able to do this.

Whatever his frustrations and doubts, Mira was not pressing him about the time it was taking him to complete the book, though theoretically she had the right, since she was essentially supporting them both with the income from her work. (Alfred had taken the de facto job of managing both Mira and their funds.) No, she only encouraged him. She felt only the greatest devotion to him and his work. Its success would truly fulfill her highest ideals.

Yet, the level of ardor, even utopianism, he perceived in her attitude towards his work disturbed him. In talking about it to other people, she sometimes seemed to him like she wanted to save the world. (He didn’t perceive himself as a utopian.) Relatedly, his work had reached a stage where he had begun to feel that her lack of scientific background and language was making it difficult for her to accurately represent in any detail what he was doing. As his wife, people were likely to accept, as from the source, her word about his work. As a result of these factors, he was beginning to want her to limit herself in how she talked to people about it—a strain in their marriage. On the other hand he admired her intelligence, independence, and “guts”—even if he didn’t like some of the things that came with them.

Some of those things included the long periods of separation her mode of work demanded. It was not only the separation itself, which he found trying. While away, soliciting the “rotten rich” for painting commissions, she had to live like them—nice hotels, the best restaurants, etc. She also tended to spend money frivolously, in his opinion, on things they didn’t need. Thus the considerable money she was capable of earning (she worked hard and deserved every cent of it) tended to run through her hands once she got it, which worried him. Until he was able to earn adequate money from his work (royalties from Manhood of Humanity were at this point negligible), he felt they both had to hunker down, decide what they wanted together as a couple, and then work together to achieve it. Which included, for the time being, saving their money and focusing on what they had agreed upon together as most important. They were not getting any younger.

To a significant extent, Mira would eventually come to agree with Alfred about aspects of her behavior he had problems with. (Of course, there were aspects of his behavior that she had problems with as well.) Eventually, the two of them would manage to minimize the areas of conflict between them. But they were going to hit some bumps on the road before they got there.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

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Chapter 31 - "The Tragedy Of My Work": Part 4 - Building a Boat in the Middle of a Churning Sea

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

In addition, his theoretical difficulties seemed profound. It had become clear that if he was going to “bring ordinary language closer to mathematics”(9), he was going to have to retool ordinary language. Indeed the language would embody his system. As he had roughly expressed it in a letter to Rainich earlier in the year, most people had not gone beyond vague agreement with his “recipe for making geniuses”: 

"Weaken phobias, knock out dogmatism, make the mental processes as free [as possible] from preconceived doctrines which are unconscious and which we cannot abandon” that’s the general rule, a rule vaguely known but which stopped short before language. Language was not supposed to be a doctrine. My general theory goes one step deeper (lower) and recognizes that as all human knowledge has mathematical structure…And when we open our mouth a doctrine flies already. Let’s silence ourselves by ruthless questioning, as we must come finally to some undefined terms, and to “matter” “space” “time” “continuity” “infinity” etc which as [a] starting point are a creed. Of course with [a] new conception of these entities (?) we have to reconstruct the whole d…d show. (10)

“To reconstruct the whole d…d [damned] show.” This was like trying to rebuild a falling-apart, leaky, old boat while you were in it and floating in the middle of a churning sea. You could expect some discomfort. Part of the old aristotelian ‘boat’ involved objectifying higher order terms such as absolute “space” and absolute “time” or “thinking” and “feeling” and considering them as separate ‘things’ while forgetting necessary relationships. Rebuilding ‘the boat’ meant going all the way with the “organism as a whole” approach and abandoning such language or else using it only with awareness. At this point, Alfred had started to put quotation marks around such terms as “space”, “time”, “senses”,“mind”, “perception”, “conception”, “thinking”, and “feeling”, etc., in order to flag them. To eschew these terms when formulating seriously required replacing them with “organism as a whole” forms of representation, terms such as “time-binding”, “abstractions on different orders”, many of the mathematical terms such as “relation”, “order”, “function”, etc. In this case, using the new labels would help one to orient oneself to new non-verbal actualities, instead of obscuring them.

An adult had to make a concerted effort to do this. One had to consciously work to develop a habit of talking differently, not just talking about talking differently. That required a different view of language as well, since many people found it easy to objectify the term “language” and treat it as if it was entirely discrete and set off from other aspects of the process of abstracting. If no one could step outside of the process of abstracting, then the only choice a person had about it was whether to keep more or less conscious of it. In the old lingo, one’s ‘mind’ mediated one’s knowledge of anything. And it seemed all too easy for people to treat their ‘minds’ like ‘windows’ which they looked through but didn’t see. Alfred was trying to get people to see the ‘window’ and to see, among other things, the obscuring, distorting ‘dirt’—some of it linguistic—that they had gotten used to ignoring. First, he had had to look at his own ‘dirty window’ and he knew it could be hard work even for some of his intelligent friends like Haywood and Glover, who took him seriously.

Both men had regaled him with objections, wondering whether working with the Anthropometer was too ‘cerebral’ since it only dealt with “thinking” and not with “feelings”. But as Alfred pointed out to each of them, one could allocate a so-called “feeling” to the “object” level of the Anthropometer just as well as a pencil or a plate. “Feelings” existed as non-verbal, lower-order abstractions. And once one opened one’s mouth to talk about those “feelings”, the doctrines would inevitably fly. This “thinking” associated with “feelings” could then have an effect on ongoing “feelings”, etc. So, of course, you could work on your “feelings” (which had to involve some “thinking”) with the Anthropometer. You had better do so if you wanted to develop your consciousness of abstracting. Alfred was not only doing this personal work on himself, he was developing a system, including the language, for doing so.

And the language of the system was still not clear and accurate enough for him because he didn’t yet have enough clarity about the system. Major portions of it were only now coming into his awareness. (Was he discovering or inventing them or both?) For example, elaborating on Ritter’s original usage, he had previously formulated the term “elementalism” to refer to objectifying the verbal separation of what does not exist entirely separate in the organism-as-a-whole.

Korzybski had also long seen the parallel of such organism-as-a-whole usage with Einstein’s and Minkowski’s abandonment of absolute “space” and “time” in favor of the more structurally correct term “space-time”. He had written about it in the second Time-Binding paper. He was just getting to the next step—to move to a higher order of abstraction and to deliberately extend the notion of elementalism to include usages outside of biological science such as absolute “space” and “time”. (He had already been doing this informally.) This then required finding a more general term than “organism-as-a-whole” to cover terms such as “space-time”. (Part of what he was doing, after all, was creating a language about language.) He had to invent the term—“non-elementalism”. It would take about another year before he started using it and talking about “non-elementalistic language”.(11)  The principle of non-elementalism consisted of remembering to distrust the verbal splitting (“elementalism”) of what does not exist as split in the non-verbal world since “...there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.”(12) Non-elementalism would emerge as a major premise of the non-aristotelian system.

Other formulations had begun to surface in his working vocabulary. For example, in the second Time-Binding paper he had referred for the first time in print to his preference for “extensional methods” and “the extensional attitude”. The term “extensional” had originated in formal logic and referred to definitions given by enumerating examples or pointing to non-verbal experiences. An “intensional” definition, on the other hand, involved defining a word with other words. By the end of 1926, Korzybski had begun to extend the use of these terms to refer to a person’s general orientation. An extensional attitude or orientation involved primarily orienting oneself to non-verbal ‘facts’—consciousness of abstracting, sanity. An intensional attitude involved orienting oneself primarily in terms of verbal definitions—confusing orders of abstracting, unsanity, insanity. (Of course, one could use intensional definitions without necessarily behaving intensionally.)

In his paper, Alfred had related the extensional attitude to the “the principle of individualization,” or the “the atomistic principle,” the notion that, as he would later put it, “...the world is made up of absolute individuals, each different and unique, although interconnected [remembering non-elementalism].”(13) This principle, elaborated over the next few years, would eventually become his premise of non-identity, what Robert P. Pula called “...his [Korzybski’s] forthright challenge to the heart of aristotelianism—and its non-Western, equally essentialistic counterparts.”(14) But at the end of 1926, he hadn’t quite gotten there explicitly. In the meantime, it seemed clear that mathematics provided a unique language for extensionalizing, dealing with individuals as well as relationships. In the paper, he noted how simple mathematical means could be brought into ordinary language, i.e., using numerical “indexes” to provide unique names for individuals in a category. He had already started to use them in his own speech and writing, as well as using dates (temporal indexes) with terms such as “science”, e.g., “science (1926)” in the second Time-Binding paper. Some people considered such language an affectation, but what better way to remind oneself to see the ‘window’ of ones own abstracting process and not just naively ‘look through’ it?

Over the next year, he would also come up with a better label for the characteristic of some terms he had already formulated as “multi-dimensional”—terms like “yes”, “no”, and many others, whose unique context of ‘meaning’ included the orders of abstractions they were used on. He would now call them “multiordinal terms” which reflected the multiordinal, many-leveled abstracting process and the multiordinal nature of the world. The multiordinality of terms explained how “Yes, We Have No Bananas” could seem like fun but wasn’t necessarily nonsense.

His system was growing as he worked out its implications, connected it to various scientific advances, showed relationships between formulations, and sought new structurally appropriate terms. His efforts to achieve greater generality involved dredging into his own unconscious to pass from one order of abstraction to a higher (‘deeper’) one, and then spiraling back with what he had found. This meant getting the living ‘feel’ of every generalization he came up with, i.e., translating each higher-order abstraction into a first-order, non-verbal one, i.e., a picture, an object, an action, an imagined experience, etc. Working to get the ‘feel’ of ‘ideas’ in this way—exciting and grueling work—was a procedure he later recommended to his readers and students.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

9. Korzybski 1994 (1933), p. 69. 

10. AK to G. Y. Rainich, 1/8/1926. AKDA 18.187–191. 

11. AK to Trigant Burrow, 12/17/1927. AKDA 21.534. 

12. Korzybski 1994 (1933), p. 50. 

13. Ibid., p. 254. 

14. Pula 1994, p. xvii.

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Chapter 31 - "The Tragedy Of My Work": Part 3 - Graven

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

In a certain sense, Alfred’s basic thesis could be boiled down to a few seemingly simple, even childish, statements: “An event is not an object, a word (label) is not the object, and a statement about a statement is not the same statement.”(6) The ramifications were not childishly simple, however. Not only did they imply a theoretical revision of all the sciences. They also led to practical techniques for the re-education of people’s ‘thinking’ which also had psychotherapeutic implications—or at least implications for preventive mental health.

With the heavy theoretical implications of his work and its potentially far-reaching practical consequences, Alfred’s two Time-Binding papers would simply not suffice. He had to rally enough interest in his work for laypeople and educators to even consider trying it. If it proved useful, more people would apply it and do research with and in it. He would then have a chance to make a living from it. However, because of its heavy scientific basis, he felt he first needed to gain acceptance among mathematicians, scientists, psychiatrists, etc. To do that, he was going to have to spell out the theory in much greater detail in the forthcoming book and provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of his methods. With Philip Graven, the brilliant young psychiatrist who had been driving him to the hospital, Korzybski felt he had in hand a solution to the problem of gathering the first round of evidence.

For the last several months, Alfred had been giving Graven a private course of instruction, for several hours a day. After medical school at the University of Chicago’s Rush Medical College, Graven had gone to Vienna to specialize in psychiatry and study psychoanalysis with both Wilhelm Stekel and Sandor Ferenczi. He had worked at St. Elizabeths for about a year when Korzybski arrived.(7) In addition to his work at the hospital, Graven had a private psychotherapy practice and had recently begun to apply Alfred’s methods, including the use of the Anthropometer, to his patients.

Korzybski realized, “...If the preventive claims [for his work] are true there should be some direct cures in a theoretically small and narrow class of mental ills, but which in life happen to be very numerous.”(8) Graven was already getting significant preliminary results. So, at least to start with, Korzybski hoped the gifted and enthusiastic young doctor, who had recently published two case studies in The Psychoanalytic Review, would provide an appendix on psychiatry with some case studies for the book.

He also realized that any empirical investigation of his work, case study or otherwise, would have to make allowances for the fact that it was not a panacea. And among those who might be able to benefit from it, verbal assent was not enough. Observable results would take time. From the few people who had actually made a concerted effort to apply it so far—including Korzybski himself—he had found that it could take a number of months of intensive study and work with the Anthropometer, to internalize the non-aristotelian viewpoint sufficiently to make a significant difference in a person’s behavior. He would continue to emphasize this point for the rest of his career. But it was a point that many people found difficult to grasp—both those dismissing his work as platitudes and those who verbally approved it.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 
6. AK to Edwin E. Slossen, 1/7/1927. AKDA 19.525.

7. Philiip S. Graven to MEK, 1/23/1927. AKDA 18.55. 

8. AK to Miss E. Leona Vincent, 6/25/1927. AKDA 20.505.

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Chapter 31 - "The Tragedy Of My Work": Part 2 - On the Borderland

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

There were other parts of ‘the tragedy of his work’. A significant part of the ‘tragedy’ lay in the very nature of the work itself. Starting from the notion of time-binding, he had staked out a limited, if broad, territory to study—the structure of human knowledge in relation to behavior. Moving epistemology from speculative philosophy into the realm of science, he had forthrightly outlined what the sciences and mathematics of the 1920s could contribute to the inquiry—knowledge about knowledge—and had sought to make it practical as well. His interdisciplinary discipline (the word “interdisciplinary” hadn’t been invented yet) (5), on the borderland between philosophy and many specific sciences, had no established name. He had given up “human engineering” and didn’t really like the term “humanology”. There were certainly no academic departments in it. And he hadn’t found any other “humanologists”. The people he considered scientific peers were not peers in his specific work. Who else in the mid-1920s was trying to make a methodological synthesis of the sciences of the time in order to establish an empirically up-to-date and applied epistemology as a foundation for a science of man? 

Psychiatry, the medical study of abnormal psychology, was important for this program. That’s why he had gone to St. Elizabeths. While there, he had solidified the link he had seen between the behavior of mathematicians and scientists when working at their best, and the so-called ‘insane’—extremes of behavior that many found odd to consider together.

Analysis of the methods and language used by each group had further exposed a partially hidden system of orientation that with few exceptions seemed to dominate the ‘thinking’ of mankind. Korzybski called it “aristotelianism”. This orientation of ‘aristotelian’ assumptions actually preceded Aristotle and involved various forms of confusion of orders of abstraction. The logic of Aristotle and his followers, when taken as expressing self-evident laws of thought and existence, simply formalized these assumptions. The assumptions had thereby become even more bound up as a system into the unconscious everyday speech/behavior patterns of most people, including scientists and mathematicians. Alfred was attempting to replace the aristotelian system (not the logic) with a more general alternative orientation—a new structure, a non-aristotelian system—that kept what remained useful of the old. Good luck!

Admittedly, every significant advance in the special sciences seemed to be moving in a non-aristotelian direction. But efforts in the various sciences remained mostly scattered. So although much of what Alfred had to say could be viewed as “old stuff”, what he considered original about his work was his effort to coordinate the scattered pieces of knowledge into an applied system. He had presented a program for a radically new vision for the sciences and life. He hoped it could help remove aristotelian blockages and accelerate advances in human knowledge and well-being. But if he was going to get other people to sign onto his program—other scientists in particular—he was going to have to flesh out his system in much more detail. Another part of the ‘tragedy’.

He already had too much material, and more was rolling in every day: for example, the newest work in quantum mechanics. He was going to have to make sure he grasped it all well enough to show how it touched his concerns. Until the book was published, he would often lament to his closest friends that he had tackled a job that seemed beyond the strength, brain, and knowledge of a single man.

He did feel most grateful to the mathematicians and scientists who had so far been willing to comment upon and criticize the parts of his writing that touched on their areas of expertise. As he continued to work on the book, he would depend even more on such expert peer review to make sure the material he used for his synthesis was up-to-date and accurate. What would continue to disappointed him was how few of these scientists and mathematicians seemed willing to commit themselves to express much of an overall opinion about his synthesis, let alone embrace his program. Nonetheless, he could understand. How could he blame anyone for not wanting to explore this scientific-philosophical borderland with him, along unfamiliar paths that had lots of ‘thorns’ and ‘prickles’? In the meantime, as a pioneer borderland explorer, he risked the possibility that both philosophers and scientists might just consider him an illegitimate interloper into their well-fenced, established domains.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles.

5. Websters, p. 630. 

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Chapter 31 - "The Tragedy Of My Work": Part 1 - Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

With Anthropometers ready and copies of the second Time-Binding paper in print, those willing to experiment had what they needed to give Alfred’s work a trial run. At the end of October 1926, he sent out some Anthropometers, with the paper, to a few friends. Other people just got copies of the second paper. Over the next few months he began to get initial responses. Some people didn’t seem to understand what he was attempting to do. Others felt they did and said, in effect—“So what?” There was much polite interest. He felt relief that at least close friends like E. T. Bell, Carmichael, Keyser, and White, considered him on the right track. Bell, for example, who had just moved from the University of Washington to the Mathematics Department of the California Institute of Technology, wrote on November 21, 1926:

Dear Korzybski:

Till now I have not had time to thank you for the generous and interesting gifts of the A [Anthropometer] and the G.T [General Theory]. I have been trying to teach the kid [Bell’s young son] to use the A, and he has succeeded quite well…As he is of an essentially blasphemous and irreverent nature he has tried to teach his cat — without success.

Would it not be well to include with the A a full printed set of directions, with examples? Otherwise it is a matter of individual instruction in each case.

I am looking forward to the book on the G.T. Make it as clear as the M. of H [Manhood of Humanity]…(1) 

Bell’s friendly letter provided just one example of the respectful attention Korzybski was getting from portions of the scientific and the broader intellectual communities, mainly in America. That kind of response must have given him some sense of satisfaction and a reason for continuing the task of writing the book.

He needed encouragement because he knew the path toward favorable reception of his work had many obstacles. In his letter, Bell had inadvertently pointed to one of them: “I see that G. N. Lewis [a world-renowned professor of chemistry at the University of California—Berkeley] has used some of your ideas in his new ‘Anatomy of Science’—Yale U. Press [1926]—particularly levels of abstraction.”(2) Reading Lewis’s repeated references to the process of abstraction in the first chapter of The Anatomy of Science makes Bell’s conclusion seem likely. However, Lewis’s book makes no mention of Korzybski or his work. (Lewis, whom Alfred didn’t appear to know, could well have read and unconsciously assimilated one or more of Alfred’s post-Manhood, pre-1926 papers since Korzybski knew people at Berkeley who would have had the papers.)

Alfred had certainly wondered about the unconscious, and therefore unacknowledged, influence he may have had on others. It seemed easy for some people to unconsciously absorb ideas from his work; perhaps because it clarified what they already knew. This seemed to have happened with H. S. Jennings and others. There is no evidence Alfred felt any animus toward these individuals or considered them plagiarists. Still, the failure to mention him as a source didn’t help the spreading of his ideas. As he wrote to Jesse Bennett the following summer, he considered it one of his obstacles—“part of the tragedy of my work”.(3)   

Whatever intrinsic value he gave to his own work and to whatever extent he wanted to benefit science and humanity by means of it, his work was also a means for him—a matter of “the bottom line”. To be forgotten would not do if he was going to have at least a fighting chance to eventually earn a decent income for himself and Mira from his writing, speaking, and teaching. Alas, in order to get adequate recognition, he was going to have to overcome the ‘unacknowleged influence’ factor by working extra hard to promote his efforts. As he wrote to Carmichael, “The developments seem to be far beyond my original expectations, yet the lack of understanding I meet everywhere and lack of appreciation is so appalling that I am sorry some times that I started the whole d....d business. But, it is too late now to go back.”(4)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 
1. E.T. Bell to AK, 11/21/1926. AKDA 18.110. 

2. Ibid. 

3. AK to J.L. Bennett, 8/7/1927. AKDA 20.582–580.

4. AK to R.D. Carmichael, AKDA 18.466. 

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