11/8/23

 Wednesday, November 8, 2023

In bed by 10, up w/ backache at 6:39, 45° and a high of 50° on a windy, rainy day, wind ESE at 20 mph, 9-21/32, 0.3" of rain in last 24 hours, 0.45" expected in next 24,  The sun rose at 6:36 and sets at 4:34.

Treadmill and Yoga.   20.00   0.51 followed by 1/2 hour of VA chair yoga stretches.  The combo fairly wore me out.  I got up to 1.7 mph on the treadmill comfortably.  The yoga that involved leg lifting was difficult, especially with the leg leg, left hip muscles.  I don't have much lower torso/upper leg strength.

Call me Ishmael.  I should have written about Melville's opening paragraph today, "a damp, drizzly November" day.

Willa Cather documentary.  What an extraordinary person!  I went through a Cather period in my reading but I can't remember what-all I read other than O Pioneers! and My Antonia.  Did I read The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop?  I think so, or perhaps I started but never finished them.  I think I also read Youth and the Bright Medusa and Lucy Gayheart.  The documentary makes me want to pick up her novels again.  I noted one quote of hers: "I try to keep myself fit fresh.  One has to be in as good form to write as to sing."  It reminded me of how impossible it is to write in this journal, or to paint, on days when I am troubled by a lot of pain, or on days when I have no usable energy, when I am awake only in the sense that I am not asleep, "dragging major butt" as a faculty friend used to say.

"Cather in The Professor's House wrote I think as dark a book as has ever been written in America and what she did, it really kind of takes your breath away.  She wrote about the experience that very few people write about which is what happens when the meaning of your life is over long before your life is over."

"Old Mrs. Harris . . . once again we're looking at something that's pretty grim which is an old lady dying quietly in the midst of a bustling household which pays to her no attention whatsoever.. . Thus Mrs. Harris slipped out of the Templeton story but Victoria and Vicky had still to go on to follow the long road that leads through things unguessed at and unforeseeable.  When they are old they will come closer and closer to Grandma Harris and their lot will be more or less like hers.  They will regret that they heeded her so little but they too will look into the eager unseeing eyes of young people and feel themselves alone.  They will say to themselves I wa heartless because I was young and strong and wanted things so much but now I know."

Republican Presidential Debate.  The first one I watched.  Words fail me.