February 19, 2015

Almost too cold to work in my study. Must write to forget about it. The one little space heater barely heats itself. This house is like a diving seal, keeping its center warm and forgetting about the extremities. It was built to be cool in summer, and it is that.
    
Great day at the Y, more reps than in months before.  Heroic sleeping yesterday, meeting briefly with one class on the useless “late start” schedule.
   
I have two students in the senior seminar who write with what I must call majesty, so firm, so sure. They use this sureness to build structures of rhetoric that should still be years ahead of them, supple and muscular, able, apparently, so say anything. The criticism you make is to say that, here and there, they are a little in love with this power, and let the reader wander from the path to admire the majesty of the forest round.  I feel blest. One wrote a paragraph on being buried at sea that may be the best writing I have ever seen.
   
I have two students who have maladies– I don’t know what to call them– psychological ones, which they use to manipulate and shield themselves from the consequences of decisions which seem to me to be wholly unrelated to the maladies. One misses classes and exams and scurries out into the hall three times each class period she does manage because she has an eating disorder (which apparently allows her to be quite voluptuous). The other came to only two classes, begged for clemency, missed the class after the meeting where I granted clemency. She is going through a “bad time.”