October 29, 2009

Staggering with exhaustion, hobbling around on one sore foot. . . Cloudy moon. . . vast, brooding dark of the forest between here and Haywood County.

Heartened by Hamlet rehearsal tonight. Horatio has become wise and beautiful. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are funny. Everyone has taken a step forward. Adam is by turns antic and agonized, exploring the role with the perfect actor’s intelligence. I sat and listened to scenes tonight, Hamlet’s soliloquies, the Player’s speech about Pyrrhus, and I was struck, as if I had not been before, not only with the greatness of the play, but with the greatness of the individual lines, of lone words spoken with power. The play is a stone palace hung with purple. It is a sea pounding on a craggy shore. It is the shadow of the hunting bird passing over bare stone. I writhe with sorrow that one might not write like that now, that the world must be remade for one to write like that now. I come home and sit at the keyboard trying to conjure again that vast music. Oh, yes, it can be done. Who would listen? Who could bear it?