Another bout of insomnia finally drove me out of bed at 4:30. Is it better to be sleepless on a weekend or a weeknight? I suppose it doesn't make much difference. The deliciousness of late sleeping eludes me, yet the thought of it is sweet. I like to imagine sleeping till 8 on a Sunday morning.

But I suppose there are worse things than sitting quietly in my cottage living room, listening to the freight train blow its lonesome horn as it rumbles slowly through the darkness.

The old clock on the mantle grinds out the quarter-hour. A jar of half-open daffodils gleams in the dim light. I am reading a sad novel about the battle between the Bolsheviks and the White Russians . . . the loss of land, the death of sons, the strange ironic inversion of servant and master.

Yesterday, by accident, I misunderstood a question about my personal dreaming habits: I thought a friend was asking instead what my dreams for the Frost Place might be, and off the top of my head reeled off what we laughingly called the Charter of the Conference. But really it's more like a charter for an imagined life . . . an opium dream, a New Year's resolution.

That the shadows of the old will continue to wind among the shadows of the new 

That the bonds of intellectual engagement will also be the bonds of emotional engagement 

That our tears and laughter will well from the same source

That we will move the definition of teacher beyond the classroom into the way in which we choose to exist in the world

These wishes all seem actual yet impossible, progressive yet archaic: a tale of what happened and a tale of what could happen. I could read them on a water-stained list extracted from a snuff bottle hidden underneath the floorboards of a tumbledown house, where mice gnaw at shattered plaster and skunk families slip among broken stones. I could read them on an enchanted blade, flickering red and gold in the silt of a Cornish lake.