Tomorrow I begin my final Beloit editorial session, which means that I may or may not dredge up the wherewithal to write to you during the weekend. And on Monday I go back to work: even as we speak, a giant editing project squats, peevish and unopened, in the cardboard box by my feet. So I feel, as I always do, hungry and melancholy about the surrender of my unstructured time--though, to be honest, I've mostly filled the 2 weeks since I returned from the Frost Place by weeding my gardens and reaming out my younger son's horrible bedroom and driving my older son around to buy soccer supplies. Still, I have written a page and a half of the Middlemarch essay. I have read a bit of Shakespeare. And today I will copy out at least a few more lines of Wordsworth's Prelude. It's something to cling to, this memory of reading and writing, as I sink into the dark days of editing an education textbook. That sentence sounds like melodrama-for-comic-effect, but it isn't. It isn't at all. For though I can, when pressed, work hard and efficiently at tasks I don't love, my writing and reading mind won't relinquish its cravings and desires; and a whirlpool sense of doom starts to develop, like a slow-moving tropical depression, as if something may go very wrong if I don't immediately stop marking up footnotes and format codes and start copying out Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" word for word. So I always do stop for Whitman. And that is why I can't hold down a full-time job.