Friday June 6

[no entry]

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"It's when we have the most to say that we're silent."

This is one of my favorite quotes from the Max Ophuls movie The Earrings of Madame de... (which recently played at the Film Forum in New York) and, though it's spoken by an aristocratic character entirely unlike Papa, it comes to mind as we start our third consecutive day without any word from him.

He has been, throughout the year, quite willing to discuss his most difficult thoughts -- whether about his romantic disappointments or intense homesickness or dissatisfaction with life in New York -- so his silence is glaring. As I speculated yesterday, it seems to indicate a setback in his struggle with the helplessness he's felt since his father died. Was the feeling so persistent and unvarying this week that to contemplate it any more through his diary was simply unbearable?

I worry for him when he's out of touch as if he were alive and traveling and not calling home. I think I also feel a touch of somewhat irrational anger when he leaves his diary pages blank; doesn't he know how important his words are to me?