Kansas City Southern Railway, 23 January (1918)

I am in the middle of a month's tour in the middle west - if you can call it a tour when at most I have only two lectures a week - but I have colossal journeys between, so I am saved a sense of idleness. For instance I have now come seven hundred miles from St. Paul, Minnesota to Joplin, Missouri - and I go straight back to St. Paul - 700 miles - 1,400 miles for one lecture.... Curse this train! It is awfully late already and that audience of Zinc miners will be waiting. Surely I haven't travelled seven hundred miles to be an hour late in that cursed lecture hall? These absurd little matters - "train connections" etc, etc - worry me more than they are worth. Why cannot I be a really shrewd philosopher and contemplate everything with equanimity now that I have two entrances to my stomach - I mean two exits? (Letters to His Brother Llewelyn)