1st July
In July 1917 he was thinking about happiness. In a letter to the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy he wondered whether 'at the bottom of one’s soul one craves not happiness but peace’. He suggested that for some people, 'something fundamental in man… finds its repose not in fruition but in creation’. Cavafy was undergoing some sort of personal crisis of which Forster was only vaguely aware, but he tried to offer consolation: 'you will go on writing, I believe’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 1 July 1917)
