Tuesday, February 3rd

I DID WRITE the poem and it was, altogether, a good day in that wild wind. When I took Tamas down to the rocks to watch the surf, we had to run back—I was afraid he would be blown into the sea! After writing the poem I spent an hour cutting and reading aloud from As We Are Now for the evening at Notre Dame University when, at their suggestion, I shall take half the hour for that and half for poems. It’s an experiment … I have never before read prose for an audience in such a sustained way. But the book is, as one critic pointed out, a récit, so it should work. I was a little dismayed to see at what a pitch of intensity it lives, that book. Now three years later that kind of intensity, which came from anguish, is so remote that I can hardly imagine how it felt. I am far happier now, but in some ways less alive, and I miss that acute aliveness. I enjoy everything tremendously—the sea, the flowers, my life here, the animals—but I am seldom at the pitch of ecstasy, and I sometimes feel that my mind itself has lost its edge. That is not something that can be changed by will. It may be that I am entering a new phase, the simple letting go that means old age. I no longer think, for instance, of buying a piece of furniture or a rug … why add to the things here? There is no longer a great deal of time. I have been moderately acquisitive, but am not any longer. That is all to the good!

The other day, seeing an old man in a car, I thought for a moment that he was an old woman. Is it true that in old age many old men begin to look like old women and many old women like old men? I believe it is. Women grow less vain; the character comes out in their faces, and men—sometimes anyway—having laid aside the cruel push of ambition, become gentler. I remember Perley Cole telling me that he could no longer shoot a deer; yet as a young man he thought nothing of it. One of the good elements in old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

This has been a winter of reading biographies, lately Christopher Sykes’ curious one on his friend Evelyn Waugh; it is such a discursive book, yet almost nothing is said about Waugh’s marriage, his children, his home life. We see him at White’s, his club in London, insulting or being insulted or imagining he is being insulted, and on journeys with his men friends. Many conversations are recorded verbatim—his rudeness really was like an illness—but we do not know the man at all by the end. What came through to me most was the enormous protection it is to belong to an élite, the comfort of being “clubbable.” It is something I have never known. But I am well aware that what the “group” requires is a willingness to be bored for hours at a time. The fun and games of any group are excessively boring in the long run, and I think this applies even to such comparatively useful “groups” as garden clubs.

There was one jewel in the Waugh book that I want to keep—Helena’s prayer to the Three Magi:

“Like me, you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. For you the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed and new defiant light blazed among the disconcerted stars.

“How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

“You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

“Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than the ox or the ass.

“You are my especial patrons, and patrons of all latecomers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

“Dear cousins, pray for me, and for my poor overloaded son. May he, too, before the end find kneeling-place in the straw. Pray for the great, lest they perish utterly. And pray for Lactanius and Marcias and the young poets of Treves and for the souls of my wild, blind ancestors; for their sly foe Odysseus and for the great Longinus.

“For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”