ABSTRACT
My dearest Elsie, It is now just a fortnight since I last wrote to you [see above] and it is always difficult to resume an intimate correspondence, as much as it is difficult to resume an interrupted diary: the events to be related and the thoughts that were meant to be fixed or transmitted crowd in and one does not know where to begin and how to set the perspective. This is the crucial point in my theory of ‘history’: that if you take any chain of events (as now for instance a fortnight of my life), what really matters in fixing them historically is to select out of the infinity of things which happened those that are of importance and in putting them so that they show one organic whole. And again, selecting means not so much choosing out of a multitude, but finding or creating certain things not visible at first sight. Just try to write a diary or write (as you do) your letters in diary form, and look at it from this point of view and you will understand all that I have to say about method in Sociology. —It seems a bit pedantic to begin a love letter with an excurse into methodology, but this came naturally.
