Oh full! A day, the which one is inclined to end with reading something interesting. I have a Dorothy Sayers mystery to read. I do not buy mysteries or usually go chasing after them, but this was given to me and I do enjoy them—which makes my not going after them a little puzzling.

* * *

Full of the ending of All the Pretty Horses—a rich aesthetic experience. I am a fan. I am going to read more Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps it was being exasperated with Harry Potter to the point of just giving up on the deathly prose (it is a good warning to a writer). Perhaps it is the redolence of Mexico and Mexican ways, even if I am less familiar with the desert ways, though I have seen it often enough, been in those places. But I think it is the quality of writing and the themes he pursues.

* * *

Dr. C. Raymond Buck is dead. He was a humane man, for all that he put up with fundamentalism. I was unable to follow his lectures until one day I got a copy of his own notes and then they made more sense. I remember clearly one day he was telling an old illustration; it was right on the Monday after daylight savings time kicked in. Behind him as he spoke, the hands on the clock began to whirl forward. It was as if he stood speaking there for hours and days and years, oblivious, gesturing, continuing on and on and on. Now he rests in peace.

* * *

I came to terms with something that had been bothering me at work. I had a dilemma because I thought I was being asked to perpetrate some double-speak in something I had to write. I do not want anything to do with writing business jargon that wars on the mind and accomplishes only the lies of advertising, the smooth perpetration of an insubstantiality or a banality or just the glamorization of something. But I understood that I was not being asked to do that. I thought I was being asked to do that because those are the only terms some people have to think on, but they were not taking from me the right to put it in the right words—a right inalienable. They used a bad example to gesture at what they really meant. At least I hope that is what was happening, for how can one be certain? I was satisfied with that understanding, but we will see if it can last.

* * *

And I was perplexed in something with my own writing which I have reached another determination about, crossed another boundary with, made further inroads to. It is the new consideration of an old problem, if not the solution. I have all this old material I wrote when I knew less, and revising it is not as easy as it may seem, not at all, for the style in which you say the thing is bound up with the thing you say in ways that one cannot seem to pry apart for all that one is the author. I have to figure out what I really meant to say and go deeper than I went the first time. It is not at all like re-writing, I find. It is more like a fresh raid on the inarticulate. I am learning that if it comes easy, it is not going to last.

* * *

That would make for a full day, but it is not over. No, I must be party to a surprise celebration yet tonight. I am no hand for social occasions.