AMERICA
I thought for the first time in my life that something in the landscape of America had really become sacred to me — independent of all I hated so bitterly. (...) I recall how when once caught imprisoned, restless, in too early bondage, in England, I dreamed of being saved by America, of taking ship for America. This was long before there was any chance of such a thing.
The Diary of John Cowper Powys, 1930
What I owe to my thirty years of train-life and hotel-life in the New Hemisphere is nothing less than a plunge into chaos with its accompanying loss of all the traditional securities of our English Cosmos.
I have learned to fall back upon the elements as craftily as a red man, to think of religion all the time as obstinately as a black man, to keep my own affairs to myself as shrewdly as a Quaker, shamelessly to express myself and profoundly to conceal myself just as Whitman used to do, and above all to grow more and more stark in my acceptance of myself in my ultimate loneliness as a queer 'guy'.
John Cowper Powys,'Farewell to America' in Elusive America, ed. by Paul Roberts
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