letter from school

We all have our troubles (!), and very few of us want to increase them. Even that third-former, who is running along the corridor now, has probably an inherent cancer, or a mind full of lechery. The child grows from the cradle, soaked in a morbidity and restlessness he cannot understand, does a little painful loving, fails to make money, builds his life on sand, and is struck down before he can accomplish anything. Is it worth me lifting up my pen to write? Is anything worth anything? It is in moments like this that I emphatically reply "no." Very striking and all that. I can hear you in your suburban lodgings laughing at my theatrical gestures ...

-- Dylan Thomas (age 16) Letter to Percy Smart December 1930