October 2021

 October 1  2021

Friday   Willow gets her booster this afternoon.  

"abandon an irreplaceable part of yourself in exchange for safety."  108 in the hard back first edition copy of Knowles Indian Summer.  Some previous
reader underlined it heavily in pencil.  Theme of the book.  In hindsight and hindknowlege it is easily deconstructed according to the castle reading of later eras.  Cleet is described as a "very peculiar boy," by Reardon, the wealthy business baron.  "Victims of their own marvelous imaginations, of their towering sense . . . of glorious visions . . .  

So interesting that in this the second novel I'm reading after Separate that the themes are so clear and repetitive.  Class structure, old wealth, how to make it in a world dominated by those families, a Gatsby-Fitzgerald motif I suppose, Knowles would have read him completely and closely.  Also interesting that he describes and thinks about houses and buildings and townscape so much.  "passed on from fortune to fortune as though these very rich families all belonged to some secret confraternity, with special totems and rituals and, above all, special rights."   this goes Exactly with the email exchange I had with Phil last night, asking him why the Jane Kendalls of the world would brag about not leaving their wealth to their children.  

Cleet makes a distinction between liking and loving, these "were totally incompatible in his nature;" he liked dogs and the outdoors . . . he had loved and managed certain girls; he had never  liked them, and with a huge wave of relief at the disappearance of a fear he had not known he possessed until it evaporated, he saw clearly that he was going to like Georgia."  Neil's wife.  102   Strange passage in many ways.  But it will be repeated and amplified in the other novels, I feel certain.  

"All of this Cleet grasped unanalytically, as he grasped everything which he could grasp, all at once, through a natural gift, like perfect pitch or an ability to play the piano by ear."    All At Once   same page, long passage—-
" Most of all, the streets were haunted and saturated and electric with all the love and desire which he now saw, for the first time in his life, had obsessed every cell of his body and mind then, engulfing him . . . hypnotized by passions . . . inebriated  . . . sometimes half with dread with desire and a typhoon of emotions. . . . The very trees seemed laced with all he had felt."  His fascination with Mary Carpenter, an older girl he watched when he was eleven to fifteen, was "evidence, at least, of his power to feel and dream and to be:"  "his feeling for her had been linked to the Southern Cross and astrology and noontime in Connecticut and being eleven and twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen years old and with a miracle that existed inside himself."  95   surely Knowles knew his Thomas Wolfe, too

class structure: Knowles was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, the son of James M. Knowles, a purchasing agent from Lowell, Massachusetts, and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles from Concord, New Hampshire.His father was a coal company executive,

also underlined by previous reader:  "Not only that; his feelings were so enormous that it took a deep intensity of experience for him to feel alive at all."  117  

"Cleet had to be closer to the pulse of life, to feel it pound, to be scared and ecstatic and despairing and triumphant by turns."  

Knowles fascination with big victorian houses, hudson river mansions I suppose, New England ones, wealth, what to do with wealth?  he has  brain
truster telling the Reardons they have the house and money of aristocrats yet they live like bourgeois.   Friends, will they continue to be.  Wealth.  Servants to might go beserk.  Or another character that might go beserk.  Throw in this Indian blood and character meme in Indian Summer.  Made up games like blitzball and High Farm tag around the antique plunge pool.
Where had Knowles stayed in, encountered, these mansions, like the ones
in Elkins Park that I saw?  Maybe as a child his father had been invited to some around Pittsburgh owned by the coal barons?  oh, Hartford, obviously he has in mind the Mark Twain house.  Wondering, if I'm a successful writer will I end up building such a place.  

Just look at this passage:  Cleet says he has a peculiar kind of talent that comes and goes for understanding people.   "The source of this gift was clear: his own feelings flowed in so many directions and reached such deep, artesian levels and shot up in such unpredictable geysers that he could understand man, many kinds of feelings because he once had them or had them now or could have had them at any time; he could feel the way most people he encountered felt and so understand them.  The difficulty he had in understanding Neil was that Neil's actions were not much governed by feelings."  132 Indian Summer John Knowles

"The phase of life we're ready for is always the one just past."  
 
The chapters on Catholicism after midway are amazing.  A true portrait of the times, the age.  Knowles was ten years younger than Lax and Merton.
The post-war glow of the church had become bureaucratized and Cleet and Neil are living out the absurdities through questioning.  The satire is soft even though we're told about fury.  Show don't tell hadn't been introduced
into English classes at Yale yet.   

enjoying reliving my life through the works of John Knowles more than I thought I would.  Found little to remark about in the collection of stories, Phineas.  title story must have been the initial seed story for the novel.  In
the one about the boy who gets moved out of his room so his new baby sister can have it, there is one line, Mel sees his things being moved out of his room, "evacuating his collections of stamps and matchboxes from the desk made him feel light-headed and bereft."  Bereft is such a great word there.  Oh the sharp and sad pain of it.   Paragon gives us Yale after Knowles had experienced Exeter and then less than a year of military service.  Yale
as it was for him in the 40s.  Born in '26, 20 in '46.   Morning in Antibes arrived today so I can start in to that and read it while finishing Paragon.  The last story in Phineas, the Reading of the Will, gives us travelogue, Egypt, and rivalry with the older brother in place of rivalry with the best friend.  Freeing himself from needing the love of the father and the sense of the older brother's superiority.  

7 Oct

During this past week, I was interviewed by a young financial consultant who was trying to win my business.   He first  asked me a number of questions about my economic situation and goals.   Then he asked about my expenses, and,  as  part of the latter, asked "What do you do for fun, Mr. Jones?"   To my surprise,  I was totally stumped.  Finally I admitted,   "I don't think I do anything for fun these days. Fun just doesn't seem part of my world anymore."  And now, three days later, I still can't recall having fun in the past few years. It seems fun disappeared sometime around my 70th birthday.  Yet while I'm not pleased to find myself in this situation, it doesn't bother me too much. I do enjoy things but I can't really describe those experiences as fun. Water skiing was fun, but that was 50 years ago.  Snow skiing was fun, but I haven't skied in at least 15 years.  Playing golf was never really fun.  I don't play games.  I used to jog almost daily but that was a kind of  health work.  Sailing was fun, but those days are long gone.  Meanwhile  I wonder  about the rest of you seniors.  Are any of  you having fun these days?  If so what are you doing that you find fun?.................p

Let's see.  I exchange a few emails a week with you.  I scan various apps and sites everyday.  I manage to read five or six pages in a book everyday.  Some days I get in a relaxed half hour walk.  some days I take a drive around the countryside for the hell of it, [bored usually by the same buildings and fields].  Yes, I think "fun" in the young advisor's sense of the word does seem to fade from our vocabularies between 60 and 70.  Depending.  One friend said he decided to hire some escorts to see what that would be like.  He lives in California.  It was okbut not that much fun, he found out.  Friends will rave still about good meals but that feels like a habit and hold-over.  Those who golf and play bridge and do long bike rides just live in a universe I've never wanted to live in, so if they have fun fine.  Even the heavily advertised Viking cruises I found to be another yawn, so perfectly orchestrated that you might as well stay home and surf the screens.  Unless you like having drinks with chummy strangers every day, which I don't.  Lots of drinks, for some.  I bought a really expensive bottle of French wine yesterday just to see if that would be fun.  I photographed the label which describes all the tastes and aromas that someone named Suckling thought it deserves a score of 94, soI thought I could try that and see why that gets a 94 and another one next to it gets only a 90.  I know that is a foolish quest on my part.  Maybe the only fun left is being foolish, out of view of most people, we hope.  It was fun in some way to buy a house sight unseen, online, this past year, in many strange ways, but I still won't call it fun.  It felt dangerous and risky and fascinating, so I suppose extra dopamines kicked in for a while.  But that's still not really fun, is it?  


——

8 Oct  Friday  PT & Ray set off after lunch at the Bistro today.  Arrived late last night.   For PT's Birthday!  

Phil:  i got a surprise call from Sitter this afternoon.  He just wanted to check up on me and see how I was going, which was very nice of him.

During our conversation, I mentioned that I had rediscovered some stories I wrote in the 1970s that I had totally forgotten about.  I then asked if he had ever written any fiction and he said no, which surprised me.  He said he had written a little bit of poetry in college, but nothing after that.   How about you?   I seem to recall that you wrote a couple of stores years ago.  Is that right or am I imagining things again?    P

Maybe I wrote one story in high school.  Scared myself, character's parents killed in a car accident.  I distinctly remember John saying one day he planned to write some novels.  Kids!!! braggarts.  I did publish some poetry in my 50s, or "poetry" since it was word hash collaboratively concocted with an email correspondent in England.  He publishes madly in small presses (many of which he makes up himself).  Got tired of that fast.  He's still at it.  
Pretty sure I read A Separate Peace after you left for Exeter, junior year, and I was amazed at how fiction imitated life.  I've been reading what Knowles wrote after that first big splash.  He had acomfortable life from those sales, which after a slow start, mushroomed into required reading in every high school.  So his writing after it is up and down, clearly he could write what he wanted towith, one suspects, very little serious editorial intrusion or agent interference.  Way before creative writing classes, not even sure he ever took journalism either.  Exeter two years, Yale English andthe first novel.  So in some of the novels after that you can see him experimenting or learning or entangling himself in some vague story and then worming his way out of it.  Writing is good enoughbut never quite as sparkling or primo as one hopes it would be.  Does very much evoke and conjure the feeling of the times, though.  Algerian troubles in the Riviera in the fifties in the second book.Third book is about life at Yale.  Wonder if it would match your sense of Brown twenty years later, but I think twenty years is just enough to have major changes in the culture of places and times.  
Va's sister and husband came up from Cambridge for one more overnight with us.  (suspect Ray wanted to have a good bathtub, their church-owned studio apt off Hvd Sq had a shower.  he is diabetic and pushing 300 lbs, hardly walks.  They headed home in their RV yesterday.)
Our Abq manager wrote:  our house rental has grossed 5k + for Sept and Oct, the peak season.  Balloon Fiesta winds down this weekend.  
My sister is in Stowe for two weeks.  We'll meet them for lunch next week.  
Just for the hell of it?  send your stories somewhere??

——-
Like Morning in Antibes more than I'd thought.  Started slow.  Travel writing for a while until the Algerian enters the story.  He is the whole story.  Never once believed the narrator was Russian.  The love affair with Lilianne feels contrived all the way to the last line—-love may not conquer all but it fights.  Knowles uses the Algerian-France conflict as the frame, same as the war in Peace.  In Spreading Fires it is the fires in summer, possibly set by the servant who goes beserk.  He is Canadian but an outsider like the Algerian.  Jeannot the Algerian is the character most alive, the relationship reminded me of Aciman's Harvard Square.  Which might be the point, in both cases.  Cross-cultural tensions, old country, new world, tribal-family pride and loyalty rubbing against modern freedoms and illusions.  I suspect Knowles will continue these patterns.  Now back to Paragon where he replays the schoolboy drama but this time at university, with Lou as his hero, Lou the Finny character, not the admiring sidekick.

Short visit with Davey this morning.  they were out playing hoops with a new basketball on the Champs de Mars courts.  He found a great new-used bike deal via craigslist.  Hoarse from playing a private party gig and yelling a lot on Friday.  Rock U sponsored a party for parents of the students.  One of Dave's has the last name of Villazon.  He met the parents, an opera tenor and a psychiatrist or psychologist from Mexico.  Turns out he's a pretty big star.  Va had seen him often in Manny's opera class.  Memorable eyebrows and face.  And magnificent voice.  A Fox article from 2014? said he had the horrible experience at the Met of his voice cracking.  He stopped, and then
after a few seconds or moments, sang the note and carried on.  Later he had a risky throat surgery and it came out well.  

Nicholas was the name of the main character in Antibes.  Russian.  Mention every so often of his sensitivity, strangeness, his short marriage seemed a concept or a given but had no detail to make it alive.  In Paragon Charlotte tells Lou he is enormously original, very unusual but not crazy.  He says his whole family is crazy.  

15 October   wired Eloy 5k  from banknh    set up deposits of my brokerage
deposits to tiia bank  Veronica  10:31 am.   Also got Randy at last at VWcredit and got onto that site at last.  Walking around the block with phone on robomusic waiting to get these calls and get a wee exercise.  Ken and Carole strolled by, said the pie has already been cooked.  Willow and Eliz late coming, 12:14, now they're here.  Must have had a good walk after the swim.  Warm, sunny weather for mid-October.  

Strange day off.  Lebanon for Lucky's coffee in the morning and then drive up 91 and Rt 10 through Landaff! down into North Woodstock.  Found Rob's food truck at the KOA, calls it Streat mobile.  Sandwich at Mad River
where a young woman said hello, took course with me in 2011, novel we used was Master and Margarita.  I think that was before 2011.  She taught at Campton for six years, took off during covid, traveled a bit, now wants to go into massage therapy.  Saw Doug in the morning.  He has trouble understanding Patsy's speech, says she went downward last Thanksgiving.

Big visit with Dick and Ann H yesterday, here.  Great fun.  

Trafton and I repaired the shower hose upstairs. [!]

This logic came home to me:  if I read/skimmed some of Knowles, why on earth would I not listen to Nicholas's repeated suggestion to read Dumitriu's Incognito?  Looked for the copy I have.  Couldn't find it.  Looked up buying another copy.  After fixing the shower hose, decided to look again.  Found it!!  Bravo.  

Last quote from Knowles??  on 338 of Vein of Riches, found this by astute skimming:  Lyle strolls in a park along the Potomac in Washington: "There are so many tales that aren't going to be told.  I'll never tell my father I raised a gun to him.  And he'll never know I wanted to kill myself. . . . .
Maybe not to know is the only thing that makes life work sometimes.
God, I have a lot of deep feelings, he thought.  It's something running right through me, very deeply, a vein or seam, all these feelings and caring and falling so deeply in love, it's what I've really got, what I've always really lived for, and I guess always will live for."   Lyle says he's glad to be free of his family and their coal baron wealth.  

Hello Ethan
Well, that didn't work so we'll try again some other time.  Come visit in Abq between Jan and end of June if you can.  We'll be back here July-Dec again.  Our Parisians are coming for ten days at Christmas.  Happy for that.  

Virginia has (self) published a small book of our tales and adventures.  Could I send you a copy?  You might enjoy recognizing some of the characters. 

I've always admired your expeditions and travels, hikes and mountains.  Mississippi seems a fine addition to these.  I haven't thought about Faulkner for years, not sureI could read him these days.  I'm a fair way into the huge Man Without Qualities byRobert Musil.  Liking it much more than Proust.  (I tried, I tried!)  Also starting Petru Dumitriu's Incognito.  Did you ever read John Knowles A Separate Peace?Very important book to me in high school.  Just read a few of  his other books tosee what happened after that huge hit.  Nothing as powerful, alas. 

It was good to see you both.  Ellen's face more beautiful than photos had suggested. 
Lucky guy.  Happy for you. 

Bob  /  Gar

—-"the noble curiosity every creative person feels for book collections" 321 Musil  

As for Tacitus.  I think I read him years ago, but all my books are in storage right now and I can't check up on that.  Anyway,  more recently I read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and wasn't impressed.   And over the years I've grown more and more critical of ancients such as Plato and his band of "enlightened" followers.   Recently two friends recommended recenty books about Jesus Christ.  I will dig out my reply to them and share it with you.   Both of my friends, who, like John, attended Harvard, are religious or spiritual in some way and I am not.  So one of them who later attended the Yale Divinity School, told me that I"ve always been a cynic.  I told him that I preferred the term skeptical..........Cheers, Phil



Shifting to a private line here lest I send to "all" who I don't want to send to.   Was disappointed by John forwarding us that article.  I think it was Bill Maher who said a short while back that we are a silly nation.  Did not even skim that article---just a waste of time for all concerned from the get-go.  Even kind of embarrassed for the academics who thought they were thinking about the question and doing research about it.  I hope John had just had an extra cup of coffee and hit a "forward"button without much attention.  Maybe still teaching he's still in the modes of "keeping up" and "reaching the students" and such.  No, I don't think you're a cynic at all.  Skepticism is something different, perhaps because while not going along with a position someone puts forward about x, it leaves room for other views which might be more telling, more promising for some insight as yet unseen.  Could craft a big thot notion that Cumberland fostered a middle way position of careful consideration because of geography.  In between the eastern cities and the western frontier (of mid-19thC), crossroads of the trains and later cars and trucks, (forgot the canal), in other words living there you had to look out for who was coming from the shore, from the western mountains, from the north, etc.  Big steel, big coal, big prison systems!  Churches, synagogues, well now I sound silly enough to stop.  "Our century is spreading outwards into a world of superficial and mechanical novelty, so why should events described two thousand years ago repeat themselves?  Are there constants of human behaviour pointing to an underlying problem that is no less constant?"  1964 novel by Romanian writer, Petru Dimitriu, only 13 pages in, about getting out from the Soviet bloc and heading west.  

It was the full moon two nights ago.  Woke up craving oysters and wanting to go to the coast and slurp a big plate full.  Might do that Tuesday, weather depending.  November of the soul on its way and as Melville puts it, time for Ishmael to jump on board a ship and sail away from New Bedford for some far distant sea.  

26 October
In spite of the news scares about a big storm, I drove to Portland today.  Rain off and on but nothing major.  Waterfront goes with rain, seagulls.  Eventide closed for the day so it was J's Oyster house and that was probably better.  Baker's dozen of fresh oysters with horseradish and lemon.  Perfect.
Cup of clam chowder as a chaser.  Long drive but all curvy two lane roads through farms and villages and fun to drive.  

from cousin Mike Stitcher

Bob, sorry this has taken so long. As far as I can determine: John Andrew Stitcher b: 1851 in Saxony Germany d: January 08-1921 in Cumberland. Married to Caroline Julianne Becker b. 2/07/1857 in Cumberland MD d.12/29/1937 in Cumberland. They are buried in Sts Peter and Paul cemetery    (top of the hill on the right IIRC) I think I saw him in the 1860 censes.  He had a brother Andrew Stitcher (same name as his father) nothing shows that he came to USA. Their father was Andrew Stitcher b: 1818 in Saxony, Germany, married Barbara Lochlehr Harchner b: 1825 Saxony Germany.   I will get back an go to our families..... Our grandfather, Joseph Frederick Stitcher, parents were John Andrew and Caroline Becker Stitcher.   Mike

I do not recall ever having heard any of this, so what leaps off the page for me, as a private uncanny eureka is the number of Andrews in this German family tree!!!!  yikes  When I chose Andrew as my religious name was I channeling unconsciously all of this history??

27 Oct  Dave rang us.  They are at a Gite on the island of Ré on the Atlantic coast, in search of yummy oysters.  So yesterday we were both slurping oysters on either side of the Atlantic!!!  Gite Rêve du Marais on Isle de Ré.  

——-
Hola amigo,

Yes, last month was not a good time in particular as my uncle was in his last days fighting cancer & I was trying to be there for my dad, who's now the last remaining Paquin man.
caledonianrecord.com  serge jude paquin

Uncle Serge was a really friendly guy. We used to hang out in his baseball card shop in St Jay when I was a teen. Last year my memere passed away and now my other uncle, Romeo, a dairy farmer up in Orleans, is in the home stretch of battling cancer. Not a good run for the Paquins. Anyway...

I would love to receive a copy of Virginia's book, of course.
Paquins
412 East Bankhead St
New Albany, MS 38652
I look forward to reading it. I still get some stuff from John Mingay, a poet whom I befriended years ago thanks to our connection to Rupert.

Well, I have to say, if anyone has done legitimate and adventurous traveling, it would be you. I still remember your stories about the painter of cups and bowls in Chile -- can't remember his name -- but I always thought that seemed like you, that you had ended up with the right people in the right place. You do seem like you would be a perfect retiree/expat in the high plains of, say, Ecuador. When I went there with my dad in 18 we learned of how expats need to buy into communities with good works, which seemed like a nice idea to me. I've not hiked much at all since the fall of 2020 -- 21 was a pretty tough year, with some good things happening (such as moving to a place we feel is friendlier and saner) but some really shitty things, including the above but also the fact that a mere 10 days after we closed on our home here, a floor refinisher left his hot machine in our living room overnight and it combusted. The resulting fire was minimal but the smoke damage was ridiculously extensive and we're not even out of it yet -- we gutted our kitchen and it's still not done. The sheet rockers are working through perhaps Wednesday and then we're hoping we can have Thanksgiving here. I'm also in the middle of a flux, as I'm happy to be here and have made interesting connections but am not sure of what I want to do next. I am disgusted with higher ed and my shoulder is not up to painting full time any longer, so I'm figuring out my next move.
20s--- ambitious professionalism
30s--- focus on physical achievement
40s--- ??
I am much more religious than ever, so perhaps this is the decade where everything finally clicks. I was chilling with my Greek Orthodox priest, Father Mike, at St George in MHT last year before he got ill, and learned a lot from him. My eldest daughter came here to visit last week and she's always been a very good person; she bought a silver cross necklace and that really touched me.

I've only been reading nautical books, most of which were left to me by my beloved uncle Albert, who passed in 2011. He was a sailor and had a Nauticat up in Kennebunkport, where my brother and I would weekend with them in the mid 80s to early 90s before it became the super douchey place it is today. He could grill a swordfish on a cheap hibachi perfectly. I miss him a lot and it's probably why I am reading these books...I have no history with seagoing, nor the ability or interest to actually engage in sailing, but it connects me to him and I like the idea of being away from everything (although the one time I was absolutely convinced I was going to die, the one time ever, not even when we were negotiating the down-climb from Cotopaxi's summit on an insane and icy 40 degree slope, or when I missed by one hour with my friend and guide Rafael an avalanche on the high slopes of Cayambe -- we could tell things were not right at all by the texture of the snow and the gullies made by rained-down rock and ice fall -- was when my ex wife and I were vacationing in Cabo, and took a boat out to the arco and along the shore, and it was the deepest and scariest blue water I'd ever seen and it was just so tumultuous that it looked like our vessel [small!] would be swallowed).

I'm happy that we serendipitously bumped into each other. I apologize for being so off but man, I have been drained and pulled around. I am not down in MS fully, as I do return to NH to see the kids and help out my aunt and my parents. My youngest aunt is moving (back) to Paris on 10/30, and my brother left New England in January for Florida, so our family dynamic is changing.

All the best & please write back as it feels good to actually write and to write for someone who cares.

xo
EP
——

George Steiner on Pessoa in Guardian 2001  (looking for Steiner on Musil)
The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie.

more Steiner from same piece—-wow, so much better then Toibin—-

If there is a common thread, it is that of unsparing introspection. Over and over, Pessoa asks of himself and of the living mirrors which he has created, 'Who am I?', 'What makes me write?', 'To whom shall I turn?' The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny are, in modern literature, matched only by Valery or Musil or, in a register often uncannily similar, by Wittgenstein. 'Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.' This very scrutiny, moreover, is fraught with danger: 'To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving.' These findings arise out of a uniquely spectral yet memorable landscape: 'A firefly flashes forward at regular intervals. Around me the dark countryside is a huge lack of sound that almost smells pleasant.'
And there is Musil as I want to have him found and praised.  Just back from lunch with Helen and Ted in New London.  Helen said she found Musil boring.  

"The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny are, in modern literature, matched only by Valery or Musil or, in a register often uncannily similar, by Wittgenstein. 'Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.'"     

The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny"  have to remember that.   And in proper company with Pessoa!!

Throughout, Pessoa is aware of the price he pays for his heteronymity. 'To create, I've destroyed myself... I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.' He compares his soul to 'a secret orchestra' (shades of Baudelaire) whose instruments strum and bang inside him: 'I only know myself as the symphony.' At moments, suicidal despair, a 'self-nihilism', are close. 'Anything, even tedium', a finely ironising reservation, rather than 'this bluish, forlorn indefiniteness of everything!' Is there any city which cultivates sadness more lovingly than does Lisbon? Even the stars only 'feign light'.
Yet there are also epiphanies and passages of deep humour. In the 'forests of estrangements', Pessoa comes upon resplendent Oriental cities. Women are a chosen source of dreams but 'Don't ever touch them'. There are snapshots of clerical routine, of the vacant business of bureaucracy worthy of Melville's Bartleby. The sense of the comedy of the inanimate is acute: 'Over the pyjamas of my abandoned sleep...' The juxtapositions have a startling resonance: 'I'm suffering from a headache and the universe.' A sort of critical, self-mocking surrealism surfaces: 'To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.' Or that fragment of a sentence which may come close to encapsulating Pessoa's unique reckoning: '... intelligence, an errant fiction of the surface'.
This is not a book to be read quickly or, necessarily, in sequence. Wherever you dip, there are 'rich hours' and teasing depths. But it will, indeed, be a banner year if any writer, translator or publisher brings to the reader a more generous gift.
——
Hola amigo,

Thanks for your kind words. I am indeed lucky to have a large family, still. My aunt and uncle officially move to Paris again today, so I'm not sure when I'll see them again, but yeah, there's a bunch of us and we're starting to disperse from New England from our former cohesion there. I am not familiar with Colpitts but Hale's name sounds familiar. I'm from Londonderry NH -- never lived in St. J but that is where the French Canadian immigrant side of my family always lived. I did almost teach at the Academy but that didn't pan out, and that was years ago. My family consists/ed of Catholics (my dad's side), Catholic renouncers (my dad), and the Greek Orthodox (my grandmother and aunts). I have always identified as GO, attending the church with my grandmother and oldest aunt on many occasions and donating, but I have never been a "Member" as my parents didn't baptize or expose me in any way to any of the religions.

PSC was 1995-1998 for me. I was the assistant dairy department manager at the Shop n'Save (funny that both institutions have been renamed) and I also walked there from Russell Street several mornings per week to work in the grocery department. Thanks for being enamored with my heroic (?) image as shelf-stocker. That would make for a good poem or short story, perhaps. My admiration for you has also been unabated over the years; I banished Ellen's dog for destroying your painting (no worries; she now lives with her sons' uncle on the Cape).

The house remodel tale is a horror but it has revealed the strength of our marriage. We work well together in solving problems and tackling bullshit effectively. You'll be happy to know that the smoke smell is probably 95% gone, if I had to use manufactured statistical data to illustrate a point, and that's due to a number of processes and factors. The disaster recovery company we deployed did a great job of cleaning all surfaces and placing hydroxyl deorodization machines, which we ran almost nonstop for two months. And when we all bumped into each other at Market Basket and I joked that I am currently not working well, that's entirely due to the fact that I've spent June-September re-priming and re-painting literally every single repaintable interior surface in the house, sans the ceilings, which I can't handle due to my neck damage. In addition, Ellen and I scrubbed the entire exterior (brick and wood trim/fixtures) and again, we're waiting on the completion of the gutted kitchen. The replacement of our entire HVAC system (ductwork and AC units) was just completed yesterday. Ultimately, one worker's mistake cost me my summer, time with my kids and family, and ultimately, my ability to settle in and work here. In the end, we've met good people with strong work ethics and we've gotten the place to a better state that it was when we found it, but it's been exhausting and costly in every way.

My goal is to start my independent learning center, which I started planning late last spring, and offer my teaching services on an individual or small group basis. I connected with several provosts at local colleges but have ruled out a return to higher education at this point. I've also been approached with opportunities by new acquaintances, but I think I need to run 2021 out and start fresh before figuring out what makes sense.

What other plans have you both made for the near and far future? Where are you able to be found at different times of year?

Peace,
E
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Mrs Waddell's kindergarten class—photo—names from Bill Stakem, from Elaine Solomon's email ten years ago—-

I do have all the names from an email Elaine sent10 years ago. They are:
Back row l to r - Dave McFarland, Andy Martin, me, David Twigg, Donald Lytle, Lee Bowie, you. Front row - Sandy Abramson, Susie Wilson, Cheryl Pence, Elaine, Pattie Schmidt, Molly McAlpin, Mary Lou.  "Sitter dated the girl on the far left who looks like an orphan, Mary Lou Fridinger."

2 November