Viewing page 87 of 99

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Arlington 15 Feb. 1948

Dear Doris:

I have read over your recent letters & mother's present one to you. One of your troubles seems to be that, like most people with any mental powers at all, you want to be yourself 100%, unmolded by outside influences, but that you haven't been able to figure out just what you want to be. (To be merely self-assertive without having any special philosophy to express is no accomplishment.) Consequently, in striving to discover your 100% of individuality, you are too much influenced by other persons' more or less haphazard suggestions: and if you get advice from more than one person, there are bound to be contradictions & cross-currents in the suggestions offered you. I suspect much of this advice may be like that of the ordinary medical specialist of these days, who looks at your teeth or your tonsils or your adenoids but doesn't see you completely. The college year is a drain on your energies and rather upsetting in its total influence; and the comparative quiet of life down here for a couple of months, even if not too stimulating mentally, might give you a chance to settle down your [[strikethrough]] walter wel [[/strikethrough]] welter of ideas and find some solid basis for procedure. You need these rest periods, even if they love you.

The question of making a living when we are not here to look after you has got to be considered. It may be we did wrong in sending you to Radcliffe instead of to such a college as G.W., where the students are not so well provided with money and are consequently better acquainted with the economic facts of existence. I think that a couple of months' work to earn money would give you a practical acquaintance with that side of life that would be worth more in the long run