Tuesday, January 7th

I WOKE LATE … it was nearly seven when Tamas began licking his paws, his gentle way of saying, “It’s time to get up.” I woke to a world thickly enclosed in walls of big-flaked snow falling very fast. Now it is thinner, there is more wind, and it looks as though for the first time in this house I’m to be snowed in for the day. How exciting and moving that is, the exact opposite of an outgoing adventure or expedition! Here the excitement is to be suddenly a self-reliant prisoner, and what opens out is the inner world, the timeless world when my compulsion to go out and get the mail at eleven must be forgotten. How beautiful the white field is in its blur of falling snow, with the delicate black pencil strokes of trees and bushes seen through it! And, of course, the silence, the snow silence, becomes hypnotic if one stops to listen.

Luckily I remembered to fill the feeder last night. This morning the first thing I saw was a blue jay, his crest up, looking so dandy. There was a goldfinch, dozens of chickadees, and a tree sparrow. The fat gray squirrels fell upon each other as they scrambled away at my tap on the window.

Here on the third floor I look about me and feel extremely happy. This is a beautiful place to work, the wood paneling such a soft brown. But the great thing is that being so high up (for the house stands on a knoll), I am in the treetops on two sides, and on the third, where I sit, I look out over the field to open sea. It is beautiful to live at the tops of trees, and even more so to look out on such a wide expanse. How lucky I am to be here! I say it every day and it still seems like a miracle … the kindness and imagination of the friends who offered it to me, the tough decision it was for me to leave Nelson. It was the right decision, and I shall never regret it.

There are hazards in living alone … I admit that I do have some anxiety about falling and not being found for days. I run up and down four flights of stairs all day, and the cellar stairs are steep. I think of Miss Waterman who, in her little house at Folly Cove, fell and broke her hip and was not found for twenty-four hours. Of course, Mary-Leigh would probably notice the absence of light at night, if she knew I was here. And Raymond has a way of turning up by ESP just when I am in dire straits. One day when I was getting dressed for a lecture the zipper at the back of my dress got entangled. I looked out the window and there was Raymond crossing the lawn! Amazing man!

But by the time one is sixty there is a deeper anxiety that has to be dealt with, and that is the fear of death … or rather, I should say, the fear of dying in some inappropriate or gruesome way, such as long illness requiring care. I sometimes actually sweat when I think of Tamas, should I fall and break my neck, Tamas unable to get out. Why talk about it? I say “talk about it” because these are the things we bury and never do bring out into the open. And what is a journal for if they are never mentioned?

To a very great extent the quality of life has to do with its delights and anxieties. Without anxiety life would have very little savor. But one does get a sense of the extreme fragility of everything alive—plants, animals, people—all threatened, all so easily snuffed out by overwatering, a predator, a heart attack. The mice Bramble brings in have no mark on them and, I presume, die of fright, poor dears.

My delights in this place are infinite. So it is fair enough that I suffer from anxiety. But for the last few years I have been highly conscious that from now on I am preparing to die, and must think about it, and try to do it well. When I was young death was a romantic dream, longed for at times of great emotional stress as one longs for sleep. Who could fear it? one asked at nineteen. We fear what we cannot imagine. There is simply no way of imagining what has not yet happened nor been described. We live toward it, not knowing … except that intense love of life has to be matched by greater detachment as one grows older. Or is it that the things one is attached to change?

At that point I plunged back into Florida Scott-Maxwell’s remarkable book, The Measure of My Days. It is one of the two or three books that have really nourished me in these last four or five years. All of it speaks to me so intimately that I would like to copy out pages. But today I must go on with the portrait of Elizabeth Bowen. It is beginning to go well, to have a momentum. At first I was overwhelmed with the memories, their variety, the problem of how to mold it?