Elegy

 

January 18, 2022

Bright morning. Began today as I did yesterday, with TV aerobics. Went through yesterday painless, supple, and without taking a single aspirin. Let’s see if it can be the same today. I made it better through the routine than the 30 year old woman on the leader’s right. That exercise could be the cure for my tottering about constantly on aching limbs is counterintuitive, but hugely welcome. 

An advantage of exercising at the gym rather than at home is that you aren’t distracted by fifty other things you should be doing instead.

Gentle vestry meeting last night, saying goodbye to the troublesome and to the beloved.  

E has died under circumstances not yet revealed. One of the junior administrators asked me for a comment, and I returned one, trying to accentuate his endearing idiosyncracies while de-emphasizing the truth that he was, ultimately, a destructive force at the university, devising, among other things, the single most elaborate and unworkable curriculum that anyone ever heard of, and enforcing it by sheer will well beyond the first telling, experimental, catastrophic year. He was arrogant, intractable, isolated and unteachable. I will in fact miss him.