Tuesday Morning

I could let the cats go. The storms are not expected until this evening, but they were not calling for those showers last night, and I do not feel like relying on these forecasts too tightly. It was only a few nights ago that there was a nasty storm between me and my babies, keeping us apart. I don't feel like taking chances.

The Natural World

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Steppenwolf

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I dreaded to cut my throat with a dread that crushed my heart. My fear was as wild and obstinate as though I were the healthiest of men and my life a paradise. I realized my situation recklessly and without a single illusion. I realized that it was the unendurable tension between inability to live and inability to die that made the unknown girl, the pretty dancer of the Black Eagle, so important to me. She was the one window, the one tiny crack of light in my black hole of dread. She was my release and my way to freedom. She had to teach me to live or teach me to die. She had to touch my deadened heart with her firm and pretty hand, and at the touch of life it would either leap again to flame or subside in ashes.

-- “Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse

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Rain

The rain has started early, by a couple of hours. I am glad I kept the cats inside today. They might have been caught out, with me worrying and struggling to get them in the house. This may last for the rest of the week, into Grocery Day. We will deal, but it would have been nice if we could have received some of this in July. I wanted to take the trash out before it started.

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2145

They were giving out a Flood Alert with the weather forecast, and now I understand why. This is a strong, sustained rain that promises to go on and on, and our yard is already turning into a pond. It's too early too get scared, but maybe we need the headstart.

Microwave Oven

The microwave went out on us last night. I was heating up a pot pie for dinner, and the machine died in the first minute. Pop notes that we only got it in August, a couple of months ago. However, since it did last beyond the 30-day warranty, we at least got burned. They come in priced below a couple of hundred dollars, so it is not a very hard hit. I kind of liked this microwave oven, though.

Shelby Foote

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FOOTE

I began to read very early and with great pleasure. I read pretty good stuff in addition to terrible stuff. The most illuminating thing that ever happened to me in those early days was winning as a Sunday-school prize a copy of David Copperfield. Now, I’d read Tom Swift and earlier Bunny Brown and his sister Sue, then moved on to the Rover Boys and Tarzan. But here came David Copperfield. I was dismayed that it was about six hundred pages long. But when I began to read I got so caught up in it—when I finished it, I realized that I’d been in the presence of something realer than real. I knew David better than I knew myself or anyone else. The way Dickens told that story caught me right then and there.


INTERVIEWER

Was reading David Copperfield an early catalyst for making you a writer and not just a reader?


FOOTE

I absolutely think so. I didn’t react immediately, but eventually it made me want to do what Dickens had done—make a world that’s somehow better in focus than real life, which goes rushing past you. He showed me how to do it too.

-- Shelby Foote at The Paris Review

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