Thursday, January 30th

RAIN ALL DAY yesterday, brilliant sun and wind today, and snow predicted for tomorrow … that’s New England, all right! But truly this is a peculiar winter and makes me feel restless. I love long periods of being enclosed in snow, forced inward. I love the winter and feel we haven’t had it. But who knows? We may before April.

People who say they do not want to pick flowers and have them indoors (the idea being, I suppose, that they are more “natural” in the garden than in the house) don’t realize that indoors one can really look at a single flower, undistracted, and that this meditation brings great rewards. The flowers on my desk have been lit up one by one as by a spotlight as the sun slowly moves. And once more I am in a kind of ecstasy at the beauty of light through petals … how each vein is seen in relief, the structure suddenly visible. I just noticed that deep in the orange cup of one of these flat-cupped daffodils there is translucent bright green below the stamens.

I come back to my happiness here. I have never been so happy in my life, never for such a sustained period, for I have now been in this house by the sea for a year and a half. I have not said enough about what it is to wake each day to the sunrise and to that great tranquil open space as I lie in my bed, having breakfast, often quietly thinking for a half hour. That morning amplitude, silence, the sea, all make for a radical change in tempo. Or is it, too, that I am growing older, and have become a little less compulsive about “what has to be done”? I am taking everything with greater ease. When I was younger there was far more conflict, conflict about my work, the desperate need to “get through,” and the conflict created by passionate involvement with people. There are compensations for not being in love—solitude grows richer for me every year. It is not a matter of being a recluse … I shall never be that; I enjoy and need my friends too much. But it is a matter of detachment, of not being quite so easily pulled out of my own orbit by violent attraction, of being able to enjoy without needing to possess.

The sixties are marvelous years, because one has become fully oneself by then, but the erosions of old age, erosion of strength, of memory, of physical well-being have not yet begun to frustrate and needle. I am too heavy, but I refuse to worry too much about it. I battle the ethos here in the USA, where concern about being overweight has become a fetish. I sometimes think we are as cruel to old brother ass, the body, as the Chinese used to be who forced women’s feet into tiny shoes as a sign of breeding and beauty. “Middle-aged spread” is a very real phenomenon, and why pretend that it is not? I am not so interested in being a dazzling model as in being comfortable inside myself. And that I am.