Good morning! Today is my 52nd birthday, and I am determined to enjoy it. Right now I am drinking hot black coffee and basking in the easy warmth of a brand-new propane heater. The electricity in this house is functioning beautifully, and the well water is clean and plentiful. My kitchen table is decorated with a pale blue beeswax candle, a tiny pumpkin, and a fresh notebook. The Red Sox will be playing a day game, and today is also outfielder Mookie Betts's birthday, so they are sure to win. I am going to do some paying work in the morning, and then spend the afternoon working on poems and cleaning house. I am going to take pleasure in washing the floors. I am going to open the birthday presents that my parents sent me. I am going to answer friendly birthday phone calls. I am going to welcome Tom home for dinner. I am so glad to be alive.

Yesterday I made a point to give myself some space, and that decision paid off spectacularly: I finally figured out how to construct the new poetry collection. Once I saw what had to be done, the poems floated into place and the title rose full formed into my mind. Now the collection is called Songs about Women and Men, and I have sent it to the editor who asked to see it. Maybe she'll take it; maybe she won't. But I do feel that I've finally been able to step back into myself after these months of tense distraction.

I am so glad to be alive.

from Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard (trans. Archibald Colquhoun)

The journey had lasted more than three days and been quite appalling. The roads, the famous Sicilian roads, . . . were no more than tracks, all ruts and dust. The first night at Marineo, at the home of a notary and friend, had been more or less bearable, but the second at a little inn at Prizzi had been torture, with three of them to a bed, besieged by repellent local fauna. The third was at Bisacquino; no bugs there but to make up for that the Prince had found thirteen flies in his glass of granita, while a strong smell of excrement drifted in from the street and the privy next door, and all of this had caused him most unpleasant dreams; waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which at first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all the same colour, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realise that deep inside him they left a sediment of sorrow which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.

* * *

What amazes me, as a writer, about this passage is how the sentence style and language control shift from beginning to end, so that, within a very brief frame, the author moves from a grumpy traveler's anecdote to a metaphysical disquisition on death. What amazes me, as a reader, is exactly the same thing: and this, I think, is the miracle of the art. Lampedusa's sentence transformation has created my emotional transformation.

To me, this writer-reader relationship is so clear and powerful. It's also my drug: why I go back to books, and back again, and back again. But then I step into the world, where so many people who want to be writers--even very bright ones, even very published ones--have never considered the idea that great writing might itself be the great mentor.

So I want to beg you, friends: Read. And love what you read. And examine what you love. And puzzle over what you examine. And cry over the puzzle. And love what you cry over. And read what you love.

Last night was cold, another near-miss frost. In the garden the deer have eaten the lettuce but left the arugula. A patch of infant honey mushrooms has erupted near the woodshed door. I am reading The Leopard and Rilke's elegies and the Orioles-Blue Jays baseball score and worrying about the Caribbean nations.

Our Realty by Kakfa situation has made one good thing clear: Tom and I are not breaking up over house problems. Nonetheless, we are no closer to living together, and I am trying not to imagine a winter up here alone.

Ah, well. At least we have heat and light. Our house has not been smashed in a hurricane. At least we do miss each other. As irritated as I am by those so-called buyers, I know we're happier than they are.

Dawn and Tom's Bad House-Selling Story

Once upon a time Dawn and Tom signed an agreement to sell their house. The buyers put down a deposit to be held in escrow. [Dawn and Tom's feelings = fluttery.] All month long they waited for the house inspector and the bank appraiser to arrive, but no one appeared. [Dawn and Tom's feelings = increasingly fluttery.] At the end of September the realtor announced that the buyers had missed their inspection date so they would forfeit their deposit if they decided to back out. [Dawn and Tom's feelings after receiving a few strange phone calls from the buyers = (D) cranky and exasperated, (T) grasping at optimistic straws.] Immediately thereafter the buyers sent in the inspector, who had been instructed to take many, many tests, including ones that made no sense (a lead pipe test in a house built in 1980?) but must have cost a mint. [Dawn and Tom's feelings = mystified.] Yesterday the realtor contacted Dawn and Tom to say, "The buyers have broken up: the sale is off: sign this form and you will receive their $1,000."

And now I will quote from the email that my friend Angela sent me when I told her the news:

OMG! Fuckin' shit!!! Stunning! What a kick in the ass. What a roller coaster.
OK, take a breath, have a drink or 2 or 3 and regroup.
You got an extra grand that you earned for your suffering. Jesussss!!

It is fortunate that we had Angela to say all of the things that needed to be said here.

Monday morning again, home alone again. Another trudging week ahead.

Fortunately the leaves will be red and the skies will be blue and the grass will be green and the cat will be white.

I have begun re-reading Lampedusa's The Leopard. This is not a book I read as a young person, but I have come to love it so deeply--for its evocation of place; its evocation of human-animal attachment; its episodic structure; its patient, ornate description; its massive delicate crumbling protagonist, a character who reflects his landscape in himself. As E. M. Forster wrote, "This is one of the great lonely books."

In his introduction to the Everyman translation, David Gilmour writes:

Giueseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, died in the summer of 1957. He was sixty years old and had published nothing in his lifetime except for a handful of articles in an obscure Genoese journal. A few days before his death, a leading Italian publisher rejected the book he had been writing for the previous two years, and thus he died in ignorance that he had written the most successful novel ever to come out of Italy. The Leopard was finally published in November 1958. The following year it won the Strega prize; twenty months after its publication, it had reached its fifty-seventh printing. 

Several books and several hundred articles have been written about The Leopard and Lampedusa's other posthumous works, the short stories and the memoir of his childhood. While much of the later attention was concentrated on the author's language and use of imagery, the bulk of the earlier articles was concerned with his political attitudes and his view of history. Alarmed by the growing success of the book and the initial enthusiastic reviews, leading left-wing intellectuals took up polemical positions, attacking Lampedusa's "reactionary philosophy," his "squalid ideology," and "his mean and narrow historical vision." Alberto Moravia called the book "a success for the Right"; Leonardo Sciascia complained that it was written without a sense of history; Elio Vittorini, who as a publisher's adviser had rejected the work during its author's lifetime, claimed it was old-fashioned and ridiculed its portrayal of death.

And yet, in my eyes, a half-century later, The Leopard is anything but a "mean and narrow" vision of history. It is, as Tolstoy's novels can also be, the portrait of a person and a landscape who cannot keep up with the times. The person knows this; the landscape does not. When I think of the anti-intellectualism of our own Right, I wonder what a writer such as Moravia would make of Lampedusa's novel if he were able to re-read it today. I think he might recognize the sensation of being frozen inside history.

As for being "old-fashioned" and offering a "ridicul[ous] . . . portrayal of death": all I can say is that this is what happens when an aging Sicilian prince spends all of his days reading fiction. His translator, Archibald Colquhoun, writes:

The briefcase opened. It contains, as well as maybe a few cakes from the last cafe, books, the addictions which made him as great an object of suspicion to his fellow grandees as his great-grandfather had been with his telescopes and comet-finders. 

The books might vary, but were all in their original language; Tolstoy, Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust, Thomas Mann, Dickens, and latterly, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster (it is pleasant to think of this admiration being reciprocated). Always, there was a volume of Shakespeare which, according to his widow, he took with him everywhere. This concentrated reading throughout the day at the cafe table . . . was in a way creative. His cousin and intimate friend, the poet Lucio Piccolo, can remember him spending an entire summer reading the novels of Richardson.

My only quibble is the phrase "in a way creative." Because, of course, there is no "in a way" about it. His reading was profoundly creative. I imagine, at times, it was desperately creative.

Yesterday's class was a good one: 10 people in a room for 3 hours, reading and talking and writing. As usual, I made them read stuff they wouldn't ordinarily read, like Plutarch and Cotton Mather and angry, thundering James Baldwin. I guess, as a teacher, this is one of my predictable behaviors: that I want my students to engage with literature as a conversation over time, not just as a conversation with their peers.

Living inside the sorrow of Plutarch as he writes to his wife about the death of their daughter . . . that sort of connection never stops feeling like a miracle to me. I never know how others will react, but I constantly feel the need to try.

Today will be a quiet one: a slow start, a slow rain. I might go to the orchard for apples. I might make a pie while I listen to baseball. I might look at that poetry manuscript. I might idly stare out the window into my browning garden. Next Friday will be my 52nd birthday. I'm beginning to feel the roll of the calendar.

I woke up sick yesterday, which is why I didn't write to you. I feel better now, fortunately, because I have to drive to the coast later this morning to teach an essay workshop in Rockland. Writers under discussion will include Rayfiel, Galeano, Ginzburg, Woolf, Mather, Baldwin, Doerr, and Plutarch. And, yes, the Mather on the list is Cotton Mather. In a workshop that focuses on writing about one's passions, I thought it seemed important to consider writing about something one passionately fears.

On the house front, it has been a week of inspections and appraisals. The closing date is now set, and we will be able to stay here for a month longer, until mid-November. But we still don't have a place to go after our month is out. You may find me under a bridge with Ruckus and 50 cardboard boxes filled with books.