Lipton’s Journal/January 27, 1955/321

The business of putting magnificent ideas in one’s notebook at night. The reason it always seems so flat in the morning is that the idea which may well have been beautiful—and dangerous—for the sense of beauty is umbilically linked with the sense of danger—was put down in cliché form in one’s haste to trap it. Normally, one might expect to be able to expand it in the morning. But the S had been alerted, and so when one reads the note, the S drowns all the H sensitivity, and the note seems ridiculous. S is always telling us, “Pay no attention to what happens at night.”