The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. 7, Healing of the Self, p. 50:
The need to take care of the nature of our thoughts was illustrated by the life-story of Eugene O'Neill. The gloomy themes of his plays, the gaunt tragedy and overhanging doom with which he deliberately permeated them, brought him down in his later years with an incurable disease. His palsied hand could not write, and dictated material always dissatisfied him. Those who deny the line of relevant connection between his grim thinking and his sickness ignore the fact that he was an ultrasensitive man -- so sensitive that a large part of his life was occupied with the search for a solitary place where no people could interrupt him and where he could live entirely within himself.
I recall reading "Desire Under the Elms" as a college freshman, but since then nothing else by or about the Irish-American playwright. A few days ago the Brunton passage decided me to buy Robert M. Dowling's biography Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, Yale University Press, 2014. Outstanding! Reads like a novel. What a character that besotted playwright was! I will have something to say later about his strange and incoherent sense of life. It will anger some literary types.
Drunkards seem 'over-represented' among literary writers. Wokesters need to address this 'inequity.'
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