Diary

I'm still not reading much but will continue on Blood Meridian and comment on it later. I seem to be experiencing a slight malaise whose origin I am attempting to identify. This isn't anything like depression and manifests itself as a temporary slowdown that shifts me away from my customary focus. First, there is spring, which diverts my attention to outdoor maintenance and growing plants. Second, there is William, who has come to be somewhat demanding. Third, there is the reading of fiction, which, in a predictable, cyclical fashion, gradually pushes me to a saturation point. And fourth there is what you might call Trump dysphoria: the feeling that something is terribly wrong in your environment that needs to be addressed.

The spring part is the most familiar and the least disruptive. As I've written, I enjoy the increased isolation that accompanies winter and regret its loss when warm weather arrives. Winter is a time of year when I can happily be preoccupied with my thoughts with the least amount of distraction. On the other hand, there is something to be said for seasonal changes, because they force you to make adaptations in the absence of which you might begin to stagnate. Philosophically, I think there are advantages to involuntary external forces that discourage the development of static outlooks. I am accustomed to moving to a different location every few years and experiencing seasonal shocks, two circumstances that require reorientation and stave off presumptuous over-confidence. Psychologically I would feel that something were wrong if I lived in a static environment, and I prefer occasional jolts over which I have little control. The seasonal changes in Vermont are far more dramatic than in, say, San Diego, and though they can be distracting, they have a beneficial therapeutic effect.

William, as I said earlier, is hardly an adorable, cuddly house pet. Although he is affectionate at times, doesn't mind being picked up and purrs a lot, he still seems like a wild animal, and sometimes I think he's not that different from a pet fox. We've discouraged him from sharpening his claws on furniture by providing two scratching posts, but he prefers the furniture because it gets our attention when he wants to go out or be fed. We've tried, with limited success, to retrain him by activating alarms when he scratches the furniture.  I use a loud megaphone which has a setting that sounds like a police siren. So far these have had only a slight effect. He has nocturnal habits and usually stays out all night and sleeps inside during the day, but he is very active when he's awake and goes in and out often. It is 3:00 A.M. and I just let him in for a snack. He has become less of a problem with respect to catching prey, partly because I have made it more difficult for him to catch birds and partly because the rodents have evacuated the vicinity of the house. We have a new neighbor with a cat, and he spends much of his time defending his territory. Since I am loyal and feel responsible once a bond is established, William remains a significant distraction, because I had become accustomed to limitless free time.

When I go through bouts of reading fiction I have a tendency to get overdosed, impatient and progressively more critical. My recurring thought is that fiction is an artifice, and that its authors play shell games in which every shell is empty: the pretense is that there is some hidden reward, but the reward never materializes. For example, Cormac McCarthy produces some beautiful sentences:

They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite.

Yes, Orion looks like a kite, but it doesn't rise in the southwest – it rises in the east and sets in the west like everything else. There is a point where I become impatient with even the best evocative language, because there are always plainer and more accurate ways to say the same thing. It has become a regular pattern for me to get a sense that a novelist is employing various forms of subterfuge in order to insinuate arcane knowledge that is nowhere to be found in their book. In my view, any writer, whether writing fiction or nonfiction, has an obligation to write with as much clarity as he or she is capable. I'd rather not pick on Cormac McCarthy, because he's truly a good writer, but this criticism certainly applies to Mathias Énard in Compass. After finishing Blood Meridian I may have to take a long hiatus before returning to fiction.

And finally there is Trump. I remember 2004, when George W. Bush was reelected: I was flabbergasted and hoped that it was a fluke that was unlikely to recur. With Trump we have a disastrously incompetent president who makes Bush look comparatively good. In the Sunday New York Times there was an article on Trump accompanied by an image of him as a giant trampling the White House and breaking the Washington Monument like Godzilla. Although I'd rather not think about things like this, I can't escape the feeling that something is seriously wrong, and the fact that this problem isn't being addressed as a national and international crisis brings into question the viability of the entire American political process.

By the time I've finished McCarthy and started on nonfiction I should be in a better mood.