Cats

A reasonably quiet night with the cats. During the last cold spell, I hit upon the happy stratagem of leaving the office door open for them, instead of marshalling them out. I generally prefer to keep the office shut. It’s more quiet that way. However, I noticed the cats like to snooze in there, and I thought that it might be a good trade-off to keep the office open, if the cats will be quiet in there. And it actually worked. With this new cold spell, I am happy to see this pattern holding up. I don’t know why the cats feel moved to be quiet in the office, but they do, as though they are inclined to regard it as their own private den. I would not bet that this will prove to be an iron law that rules forever, but I will gladly take advantage of it for as long as we can get it.

Anne Sexton

David Brooks has a piece on suicide. As an example of the kind of all-consuming isolation that a person can feel, he gives us a quote from Anne Sexton. She wrote it before her own suicide.

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“Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can’t Live It. ... To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay, that’s the rub. I am like a stone that lives ... locked outside of all that’s real. ... I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something, for then I could be brave, but to be not dying and yet ... and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can’t, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but ... to do it all wrong. ... I’m not a part. I’m not a member. I’m frozen.”

-- Anne Sexton

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As for her suicide, according to Wikipedia, Ms. Sexton had lunch with a writer-friend to revise galleys for her work The Awful Rowing Toward God, and "on returning home she put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning." A year before her suicide, she had said that "she would not allow the poems to be published before her death."

{Source: Wikipedia}

Winter Days

If there is one thing I don’t like about our winter days, it is having to take a shower.

“Well, you were never big on bathing.”

Very funny. The problem is that being cold and wet never work well together.

“I thought it was the soap and water.”