Monday, January 6th

IT FILLS ME with terror to see that the first week of the New Year is almost over, and what have I done? I did sketch out a poem on New Year’s Day, but I remain dissatisfied, unexhilarated by free verse. Perhaps I can go back and make it better. I have made a start at the portrait of Bowen which produced an earthquake of troubling buried memories, and also astonishment at what was given me, as if by chance, in those years between 1936 and the outbreak of World War II. I am troubled partly by seeing very clearly at my present age how much the young take for granted without a qualm—before thirty one does not know what the creation of a delightful dinner party has cost the hostess in time, energy, thought. It all seems so easy and charming when one is present as a guest, the recipient of bounties one cannot even assess.

I haven’t yet formulated a way of handling three enterprises at once—this journal, the book of portraits of which Bowen is the first, and poems. But the only thing is to immerse oneself very fast as if a plunge into icy waters and hope to find one can swim one’s way to safety! And that I am about to do.

Again a serene, cold winter day, brilliant light. The way the sun shines through the petals of pink and white cyclamen in the plant window and lights up a scarlet and a pink poinsettia is one of the rewards of getting up.