June 22, 2016

Not yet 10 AM and I feel hugely accomplished. The big news is that I ran a mile on the elliptical at the Racquet Club without growing faint, without even breathing any harder than I ought, which means I am recovered from the shadow of anemia. Sat down in the café afterwards and began Don Quixote, which I assigned for my fall fiction class. Ten pages in I was weeping– yes, it was funny, but I wasn’t weeping over that, but rather because it was perfect and beautiful, and that kind of beauty affects me like grief. I am Don Quixote, of course, which gives an additional blessing, which is perspective. The life of absurdity is rather dearer and sweeter than one might have thought. It also allows others the opportunity for patience and charity.
   
Watered the gasping garden. Fed the gold streaks in the water. Turned the hose on a female towhee, who wanted it, who stood in the stream and shook her feathers.
   
Did badly at rehearsal last night. My tendency to rush became a sort of tidal wave.
   
Oh, speaking of absurdity, the great and hilarious one is that on the ride back from Waynesville I admitted to myself that I had fallen in love, grievously, catastrophically, like a boy of twenty, like a river swollen with hurricanes, like a burning city. It is altogether ludicrous and, for the moment, altogether outside of my control. God must be slapping his knee and holding his gut. He is the perfect man–for me– or would have been when the doors were yet open: dark Irish, beautiful in the eyes, brooding and kind in the soul, stunning to look at, friendly and loving, artlessly poetic and so far from the appropriate that even the kindly angels must laugh: thirty years too young, newly wed to a beautiful wife. . .  I am trying to make this seem funny–and it is–but I wept the forty minutes through the mountains and then wept myself to sleep, for the hopeless absurdity, when after all this time I thought I had been hopeless and absurd often enough and grievously enough to satisfy the Lord. Who is, apparently, insatiable. It is not without its sweetness, but neither is a battlefield amid which grows one rose.
   
So of course I begin Don Quixote on that very morning.