Monday, May 5th

DARK, cold gray with a high wind … will the spring ever come? How I long for one of those still warm days where you can feel the leaves opening in the sun and the roots stirring below! It’s infernal to have to wait so long this year! The only thing that grows is the grass. It needs cutting already. I suppose it is just as well, because I have no time to garden till after May 11th and the commencement address at Clark is over, the last ordeal after tomorrow, when I speak at New England College.

But yesterday was a memorable postbirthday celebration, for Dorothy Wallace drove Katharine Taylor here for lunch. K.T. (former head of the Shady Hill School) is eighty-six, a frighteningly thin skeleton, walking gingerly with a cane, but the spirit flaming alive, all her wits as keen as ever, and her wonderful genius for being absolutely with whomever she is with, of all and any age, untouched by time. It was a feast of joyful reunion, for I haven’t seen Dorothy for years or heard her marvelous laughter. They were over an hour late because they got lost and I had waited all that time in the cold at Fosters’, the florists, to show them the way in, and had imagined all sorts of horrors, of course. But all that was forgotten in the warmth and joy of our talk by the fire, drinks, lobsters, and splendid white wine Dorothy had brought. Of course, the sea was gray as usual … I had so hoped it would be blue!

I again had long dreams about the Huxleys … these recur almost every week since his death. I think about Juliette and long for time to write a real letter. But I am leading an outside-in life until mid-May, with never time to breathe or let down, as far from creation, or even friendship, as it is possible to be without being fatally ill—and, in fact, it feels like an illness to be so far from my inner self.

The one continuity is Wain’s Samuel Johnson, which I am reading with much pleasure. I went to bed at half past seven last night (it had been a long day), very happy to be in bed with a huge glass jar of pink birthday roses beside me and Tamas and Bramble on the bed. Who could honestly complain about a life such as this? I am the luckiest person in the world.

I feel this whole year has been a kind of interval. Too many deaths to absorb, and I think I must try to take on fewer lectures from now on. To give even one public lecture makes deep inroads into what I really mean about my life. It is to be “in the world” and that is just what I feel I can refuse to be in …