Four degrees this dark morning, and I am already alone. Tom has rushed off to Portland; the boys have tumbled out to school. Dogs are barking, Tom's work pants are bustling in the dryer, and I am not exactly at loose ends but certainly my laces are flapping and my scarf is slipping into the snow. I think I might like to read some Wordsworth today.

A friend of mine shared the text of Mario Vargas Llosa's recent Nobel lecture. Principally the novelist talks about his life as a reader, but of course a life spent reading perforce becomes a life spent understanding that other people do not read and that not reading has political and social consequences. To tell the truth, I found this lecture difficult to take in . . . not because it is particularly complex, or because the thoughts are new to me, or even because Vargas Llosa extols books I don't care about. In fact, he speaks of Dickens with love, as I've noticed is the case with many of the great Caribbean and South American writers. Rather, I found myself shrinking from the pain of recognition--yes, here is another barely competent, distracted, obsessed reader, and what a bizarre and embarrassing world we make for ourselves, constantly falling over our own shoes. He quotes his wife as saying, "Mario, the only thing you're good for is writing." He seems proud of the rebuke, yet I wince, even though I know that his single-mindedness is, in fact, why he is delivering this Nobel lecture.

It's a conundrum to me: my helpless obsession with the canon; my helpless self-flagellation about that obsession. I'm the freak I want to be but I don't want to be that freak.