No liquor in the house but absinthe. J. is gone back to Stanford and will be gone many more nights before all this is through. There was some wine at the Finnegans Wake group; now I’m reading Keats and listening over and over to “Reckoner”—I can’t understand most of the words and don’t really want to. It’s all our sins being reckoned. I can’t believe how sad it is.
October. I turned the heat on and moved the guitars to safe places. The class I’m teaching is turning into a bust—it’s eight in the morning, the students are tired, they have other worries and have stopped bringing ideas into the room. In the absence of those ideas I can of course pace in front of the blackboard and free-associate about the books for eighty minutes, but that isn’t really what it’s supposed to be about.
My career in the absence of all other careers.
The buildings are so high in these cities.
The Keats biography points out how hard he tries in his letters to avoid any taint of self-pity. If we were all so good.
She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful and life was so short. (Just another point of view to consider.)
