Wednesday night and Thursday morn

How the night owl blinks and gasps, confronted with the morning...
My alarm is set now for 6 a.m., and in what already is a half-darkness, neither night nor day, my eye falls on the spines of Christina Stead's Ocean of Story, and her last and unfinished novel, I'm Dying Laughing. "UNO 1945," which appears in Ocean, is a brilliant, despairing piece, about an ill-fated couple that cannot quite reconcile themselves either to Communism or the rapacious Hollywoodized capitalism that surrounds them. They are much given to what V. S. Pritchett, trying to understand what Dorothea Brooke's marriage would have been like *after* we close Middlemarch, called the infuriating stupidity of the intellectual. Likewise Stead's Emily and Stephen. They know too much, they weigh too many opinions: their lives are a blur, and they cannot act. The story, when she expanded it into that last novel, collapsed. Like her heroines, Stead had a stream of brilliant but unfocused words at her disposal--only once, really, did they simmer into the great tragedy, The Man Who Loved Children.
Mist is still burning sluggishly off the fields of Amherst as I drive gradually south...

Farewell to all that, my darling

Dear Teleboobie:
How can I say goodbye after so many years? when did we meet--was it really more than thirty years ago? You must have been in your early twenties then, while I was--well, I won't say just how young I was when you seduced me--there are supposed to be laws against such things, but they're honored in the breach everywhere nowadays.
You have had so many styles. When I first new you, it was all black and white, but as you've aged, you've taken to wearing more and more color--it's downright garish now. And what loquaciousness you've taken on of late! years ago, when you spoke, it was only in three or four voices; now you have hundreds of things to say all at once. So much movement and changefulness and noise. I can't see how you can find the energy at your age; but you do, and there's no sign that you'll slow down.
How many sweet memories I have of you--so many wonderful, terrible, gladdening, distressing sights you have shown me: Mary Tyler Moore's hat careering into the air. The Michelin Tire Man--or was it an astronaut--walking unsteadily through the airless black curtain over the white moondust. Edith Bunker racing out of her kitchen away from the rapist she'd just attacked with a plate of brownies. Jed Bartlet scolding his God under the gentle arches of the National Cathedral. The sickening collapse of the Towers. So many sights to see.
Here is the part that is so hard for me. I need more than you have ever been able to offer. You talk--there is no end to the stream of your talk--but you don't listen. In all that sound, there is no substance. I keep waiting for an intelligible idea, a message, just a single message--and there is none. I am beginning to think that you can't grasp what it might mean to have an idea. You show me so much--but you never illuminate what you show. Spreading light and shedding light are not quite the same thing, my dear, and you have never understood that.
So, this is the end. I have unplugged you. Yes, I've left you before-- the last time, I left you for Leo Tolstoy, do you remember that? I was reading War and Peace, which has all your beauties and more, and you seemed so foolish and empty beside Natasha...Yes, I'm sure I'll see you in other places. I know I'm not your only victim--or do you call them "friends"? I'll see you in other houses--in clubs and stadiums and airplanes. I'll nod; I might even say hello. I won't pretend we've never met.
Will I be back? I said never last time--when I went off with Tolstoy. I'm human; I'm fallible-who can say? But this I know--you won't miss me.