Williamstown 2

May 6, 2013

When Patti me took me to the hotel after dinner, I looked up at the moon and exclaimed, “It’s purple!” meaning that the sky behind the moon was deep, assertive, unmistakable purple. She seemed astonished. She said, “People call this the Purple Valley, and that’s why, but I’ve never seen it.”

Blazing perfect day yesterday, absolutely cloudless from sunrise to sunset, the sun cutting objects from the horizon like a crystal knife. I found the one café open at 6 on a Sunday morning, and had my cappuccino with a volume of the Harvard Classics from Tennyson to Whitman. Re-discovered George MacDonald, wept over Whitman’s “Last Invocation.”  I knew I was going to be happy all day, and I was. I had nothing to do but walk around, and walk around I did, in the cut-glass air, with the catbirds singing to me from the flowering branches. Discovered the Camperdown elm, which I now covet. The grass was blanketed with veronica, as I remember it being. Made my way to the Clark Museum, with its excellent and not overpowering collection. Was given a pencil by a security guard, so that I would stop using my pen with which to write in my journal. He explained that I might accidentally pitch forward and drive my implement into one of the paintings, and a pencil was likely to do less damage. Bought cards with warblers on them Wrote an intricate rhyme-y poem in the museum café.

Williams and Willamstown (they seem to be almost wholly congruent) make a kind of paradise– a bit of flowering woods, a bit of college, a mansion, a bit more of woods, a museum, another mansion. It is a kind of superior Hiram, and that place was on my mind as I strolled. It was if I were a good Egyptian and died in one place I loved and resurrected in another place like it, but much better.

Rehearsal for 16th and Curtis went well. An actor’s names is Curtis. One of the actors is David. Patti’s husband is David. The talk-back host is David,  Every third man in this town is David. As I said, the rehearsal was satisfactory, Curtis of the many voices was sensational. Cute Patrick the Pigeon was very passerine and very funny. David the actor was very. . . uhm. . . professional, very anxious to get it right, and we polished several passages at his behest. Passages had to be explained to him. The play is funny. Parts of it were funny the 4th time through.

Left Patti’s living room and went to a performance of the college choir’s Mendelssohn’s Elijah at Chapin Hall, with the light streaming through the windows. It was not an outstanding version of the piece, but it was a satisfactory one, A smear of light reflected onto the high ceiling from one of the cellos, moving when the cellist moved. I sat wondering HOW to listen to an oratorio. Is it an elevated kind of reading? Are we meant to absorb the sacred text on some more consecrated level? Is it an opera not to be embarrassed by staging? I kept weighing in my head the possibility of writing one. Saw cute Patrick and Linda the casting expert at the concert– one day and I’m already running into people I know.

It must be said that I was peculiarly happy all day. As I look out the hotel window at the swelling pale light, I see no reason why I might not be so today. Part of it had to with traveling, with discovering a new place. Part of it had to do with obtaining (if not exactly buying) The Silver Linings Playbook at the airport. I’m enjoying it, but I also note that any of, all of, my stories are better than this famous and valuable book on every level. This is comforting because, whatever is blocking publication, it is not–I was at that instant persuaded– me, not the quality of the work, not anything I can help except through persistence. There was, for a day, truce between me and heaven.

Dinner at the Thai sushi place on Spring Street, meltingly delicious because I had barely eaten all day. The campus is weirdly underpopulated, maybe because it was a weekend. Maybe everyone is just too elegant to be out and about.