Today is my 45th birthday--halfway to 90, which at least makes 90 seem a long way off. But it's funny how much of one's life is spent in feeling old. By the time we're 30, we've already started regretting our youth.

I'm posting a link to Gregory Corso's poem "Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday." If it weren't under copyright, I would write it out for you myself. I like to read this poem on my birthday. It covers all the bases and has a strange awkward music that I love. It makes me feel as if Corso is trying to borrow money from me . . . which is to say that it feels alive.

It is raining today, and I have no particular plans. All the boys have gone their separate ways. Later I'll have to drive Paul to his piano lesson, but until then I will be home in my little fiefdom. Earlier I lit a fire in the woodstove. Before long I'll go out into the wet and feed the animals and perhaps afterwards I'll walk in the woods., which will smolder with that peculiar, hypnotic, yellow light of dim autumn.

Eventually I'll take a shower and eat breakfast. Eventually I'll sit down again with The Mill on the Floss. I finished the Blake essay yesterday, and I'm feeling somewhat worn. It's tiring, this writing work. Now I have to learn to breathe regular air again, and all my muscles ache.

But I don't mind being 45, though of course at the same time I do mind it, very much. We humans never know what we need. Here is a bit from my Blake essay, a paragraph I wrote yesterday, as this mood of ambivalence and resignation and also pleasure came upon me:

"Where man is not nature is barren," Blake declares. Outside my window, a small wind clatters among the dry leaves and raps against the pane. Tomorrow is my forty-fifth birthday, and all I have learned about myself is to keep reading. I look down at my book, and Blake says, "He who has suffered you to impose on him knows you." For a moment the wind quiets, and now a single car sifts past, tires sighing on the damp tarmac. I don't know what the poet wants from me. But if nothing else, I can be sure he intends no comfort.