Cambridge

June 27, 2011

Lovely thicket outside my window, which the cunning gardeners let grow to protect privacy and limit access to the ground floor: two kinds of ilex, a wispy beech, several kinds of shrubs, a laurel struggling to surmount it all, loud with birds at morning and evening. It is far less bug-infested than such a place would be in Carolina, though in the morning one sees battalions of slugs feasting on the fallen of the night..

Today looks like a slightly dimmer version of yesterday, which was hot and brilliant, the light actually painful when taken full-on. After classes I wandered through the greens, then way up Trumpington Road and back. It being a beautiful Sunday, Jesus Green was filled with half naked kids playing and lying about and cooking on portable aluminum grills. An Italian girl slapped her boyfriend, hard. He simply turned and walked away, his male friend coming, astonished in his wake. She went back to the group and taunted another boy into wrestling with her. As I passed under the great aisles of plane trees a sadness came over me which was at odds with the brilliance of the evening. I remembered passing the same way under starlight, sometimes the stars of morning, sometimes the stars of night, full of ideas of destiny, which seemed itself an overarching firmament that there would be no end of. And now it is forty years later, and the flaming dome is no closer than it ever was, and to my longing is added perplexity, that all that just and able labor has come, essentially, to nothing. I may be very far fom where I was, but I am no closer to where I want to be.