April 21, 2013

Underestimated the effects of the fever, and though I did some gardening (digging a ginseng plot and a patch for black hollyhocks) and went to the senior readings, I spent the rest of the day recovering.

Mortal combat with the ants. You think you’ve left them no reason to come into the house, but they can make a meal of the most unlikely things. Flour and sugar go into the refrigerator; cat food sits in a shallow lake in a cookie sheet; every used fork or glass is put into its place. The can of ant killer never goes back into the cupboard, but stands ever ready for use. You always leave one to scurry back to the hill and cry “Horror! Horror! Go there nevermore!”

Everyone who knew him says that the captured Chechen bomber was a sweet and merry boy. The best play in the world might be the one which tells how he changed from that, or–even more horrifically–how he did not change at all, but how his sweetness and mirth somehow encompassed that benighted deed. I’m trying to imagine how I could hate a people I lived amid so much I would want to blow them up. Wouldn’t I just leave and go home, or find a cabin in the woods, or something? Was he Svengali-ed by big brother? An intellectual hatred is the worst, so let us think all opinion is accursed–