Bug

"Dearest Mucklebugletski;
Today I got four letters from you so it is a national holiday...I'd like to explain to you about journalism but I don't know whether I can and am maybe too sleepy. I see perfectly well that it is bad for you; as it is not really a good enough trade for you and it has also a faintly or permanently non-grown-up thing about it. But it is good for me. It gives me many things for my eyes and mind to feed on, and they need to feed on actual sights rather than reading, simply because they are not first-rate; but that is their best food. It gives me a chance to meet people I would never otherwise meet, and I want to know them.
[...]
I know it does not harm me to do this work. On the contrary. It tires me physically but as I do not take myself solemnly I have no chance of believing myself to be a prophet or a power. I feel and act like a hardworking stenographer and I feel kind of happy about it in a grubby hardworking way. I do not think you need ever worry about me turning into a walking dead: on occasion, when with shits, I try very hard to throw weight around since that is all they are impressed by, but am never very succesful at it. And I'm not a walking dead because it is a great big world and I love to walk about it and look at it.
[...]
I not suggest this is either good or necessary or desirable for you. But I do think you would wish very much to have seen, the other afternoon, the tiny little silver balloons like elephants floating against a pink-red sky, over a city that is now so shabby and still quite lovely. I think you would have liked the black Lancs going off into the black night. I think you would like the cold long train rids, listening to the people talk. I think it is not disgusting to look at the world and at the war; because someone must see, and after all we have trained ourselves to see. It is an honorable profession. You are a very great writer and what you see gets pressed down and compact and one day it becomes a book. I am not a great writer and function more like colonic irrigation, with things coming in and out at top speed. But I am on occasion very mildly pleased with my articles and even when not pleased with what I write, I am immensely pleased with what I have understood. My mind feels good now, lively and digesting with ease."

[Martha Gellhorn to Ernest Hemingway, December 13, 1943]