I've always struggled with the late novels of Henry James. His early and midcareer novels are old friends: What Maisie Knew, for instance, and especially Portrait of a Lady. But the three massive novels at the end of his career--The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl--have always beaten me. I try one or the other of them, and within twenty pages I give up in bewilderment.

Until this week. This morning I am thrilled to report that finally, at the age of sixty, I appear to have learned how to read a late James novel. I have been working away at The Wings of the Dove for two days now, and I'm following the plot, I can tell all of the players apart, I'm impressed and moved by the depth of the characterization, and I am easily unwinding the circuitry of the sentences. All I can think is that my years of training on Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, Iris Murdoch, and Ivy Compton-Burnett has finally paid off.

Yesterday I got a big chunk of my student annotations done, and maybe I'll be able to finish the rest today, or maybe not. I've got to work on class plans, too, and copyedit, of course . . . the day spills over with obligation. But I'll go for a long walk first and try to clear my head of the Henry James wool. He is a great writer, but also an insinuating one. His sentences invade.

I think I might make a homemade Greek pizza for dinner tonight. I think I might do some dusting this afternoon. I think I might reread Coleridge's "Lime-Tree Bower" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" to try to figure out why they sort of sound like the same poem. I think I'll carry up some firewood from the basement, and fold laundry, and mutter over the poem drafts I wrote this weekend.

Descriptions of my days always sound like nothing and everything. I can never decide if I'm lazy or overzealous.