Just One More Thing

From Just One More Thing:

I decided I'd do some reading. I rented a room in Greenwich Village (Merchant Marine money–my father would pay for schooling, but not for reading), I got a lot of good books, a lot of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Conrad, Chekhov. For four months or so I was absorbed in them. Although I was in no hurry to find out what I wanted to do in life, sitting in a room and reading for four months started to feel odd. It was hard to explain to people and I felt if I enrolled in a school it would look to both the world and myself that I was headed somewhere.