September 17, 2011

Intricate and teacherly dreams before waking. I was writing samples of truly elegant prose, and comparing them with other examples, both mine and others’, to judge their effect and dispatch. Ann was my partner in the comparisons. She was all the time bringing in the Florentines. Unusually, the prose came with me out of sleep, and I will begin writing one of the stories down as soon as I finish with this.

Cold snap. Summer’s end. It’s cold in the house, and only the near approach of morning prevents me from turning on the furnace. My days have been crushed with duties, so I have neither written nor thought very much, but now it’s Saturday and my head is full of ideas.

Futile property-hunting yesterday. One place pleased me because there was a wild turkey in the yard. Otherwise, my heart isn’t in it. It’s not that I’m trying to please a companion or that I have found my dream house, just a vague notion that change might do me good, hobbled by a more definite notion that it will be more trouble than it’s worth. This one is too much in the shade. That one sits wrong in the yard. Here it is too noisy. Never get up this hill in the winter. Don’t trust the well. Wrong trees in the yard. And so on.

Tried to watch the British import Portrait of a Marriage, about Harold Nicholson and Vida Sackville-West. What a wasteland of melancholy glances and thousand-mile stares. The beautiful interiors seem created to set off human misery in the higher relief. How tedious love between women is to a man, who expects, once in a while, a little sweaty action.

Faculty reading with CL yesterday. His enthusiasms are refreshing. I found him playing with a soccer ball in his yard, and took him for a teenager, almost asking him if he knew where he was.

Brewed tea in my green Spode FitzHugh and am drinking it from green filigreed glass, to see if a little ceremony at the beginning of the day might change things. Dawn is still an hour away.