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[The first section includes Griffin's extensive notes on writing and art in outline form and is clearly influenced by Maritain's aesthetic works. He begins with his view of writing that "creative writing cannot be taught, but we can learn to remove many of the impediments to creativity". Discussion of various elements: characterization, writer as creative filter, challenge to express the inexpressible, universality of experience ("you have to become all men at all times: leave yourself and become the other. Gamble on truth"). How keeping a journal can aid in these ventures: "This means that sometimes, for the sake of truth, you have to write things that are personally offensive to you .... This comes most most naturally from keeping an absolutely private journal." Then there is a section entitled "Essences and Accidentals" which is a five page outline of Maritain's ideas fromCreative Intuition in Art and Poetry(Griffin's aesthetic Bible). Finally, some Griffin notes on techniques, revision, things to avoid and misplaced motivations. [included herein is a folder containing one stray sheet of notes in Griffin's hand, plus a three-page carbon typescript he made from Maritain'sCreative Intuition, ("definitions of art").]. The remainder of this notebook is as profound in the personal sense as the first portion is in the artistic sense. Griffin arrived in Toronto on June 11, 1977. He was met at the airport by Dr. Viktor Frankel, a thinker Griffin had long admired and was meeting for the first time. Frankel is best known for his first book,Man's Search for Meaning. His account of enduring a Nazi concentration camp and the existential opus that begins his psychoanalytical career as the founder of logotherapy. The next day, Griffin had a long dialogue with Frankel which he called, ..a great interview. I have never in my life met a man whose thoughts and conclusions so nearly matched my own." Griffin discusses Frankel's ideas at great length and their affinity to his own, less systematic worldview.. Also at great length, Griffin discusses his depleted physical energy due to diabetes and heart-related ailments. "My problem, my physical condition obliges me to make demands on others that go against my conscience. When others through love and perception sense the needs and volunteer the aid, then the conflict ceases and is replaced by an overwhelming gratitude. It has always been profoundly repellant to me to have to ask someone for what must be given. That is the great dissonance of my life: My needs, for example, deprive my wife, Tom [Father Tom McKillop], even my children, of the peace and rest they need...no matter how willing they are to help. Because I try to hold off asking until too late, I face them with crises and fatigue. This destroys me and worsens the condition. I hold off asking (imposing) until I then grow sick and cry out for help.". In rereading the "Scattered Shadows" chapters inThe Reader, Griffin was deeply struck by the attitude (of false heroism) he had while slowly losing his sight in France thirty years earlier, in 1946. But he recognized the falsity then and overcame his own hypocrisy. "Strange indeed--my present helplessness and confusion wiped from memory the very meaning of that earlier discovery. There I could find finally objective meaning--the fragments were finally perceived as a whole. This time [with one leg amputated, with regular heart failures, constant pain and insomnia] I have been unable to do that--so meaning is too often replaced by sadness, even despair, even blackness without light but I cannot feel it too often Too often everything, even knowledge and perception seem wiped out by the heart-organ's physical inability to function--so the symbolic and real heart get clouded, desperate, fragmented, unwhole--and I know and hate-it-and beg for help.... Dr. Frankel refreshed these dim memories that have so permeated all my work."