A large selection of Girard Haven's written responses to students of the Fourth Way asking his advice on practically every aspect of their personal work. This large volume of Girard's letters, written over 20 years, will foreseeably become a very treasured workbook.

From a letter of 1990
Dear friend,

Your letter has evoked some 'I's about working on the feature of vanity which I do wish to share with you.
One of the most difficult things for it to recognize is that it is just the same as everyone else; that we are all in the same boat, we have essentially the same 'I's, and in the end, for all practical purposes, there is objectively very little to distinguish us. To avoid confronting this (to it) horrifying realization, vanity tries to make itself special. Thus, in trying to reduce vanity and the sense of 'personal' in your writing, you have done something which will in fact attract a great deal of attention. That is, by writing anonymously while everyone else is putting their name to their articles, the feature is attempting to set you apart—and in the guise of working on the feature! If you can really understand what this means, you will realize that it is impossible to escape from the feature, because it will always be the feature which is doing the escaping. The only course left is to truly separate and observe, to accept yourself as you are without judgment. And that is one thing which no feature does mechanically, especially not vanity.

So, if you are really serious about working on vanity, I would very strongly encourage you to do what everyone else does and put your name on what you have written. Despite your concerns, I assure you that it will have no effect on your unobtrusive approach at all. Indeed, while this approach may have been a necessary trick to get around the inner considering which the feature created about writing in the first place, now that you have written something (which is quite nice in its way and may be of use to others, but certainly is neither remarkably good nor bad), the best thing to do is to leave the trick behind and try to be ordinary. This will set you up for the next big shock to your vanity, which almost certainly will be that, aside from perhaps a few passing comments from some people (along the lines of "I see you have written something"), no one will take any notice. In fact, you might consider whether avoiding that possibility is not a large factor in the feature’s desire to hide behind anonymity…