a few years ago addy wrote and said (about one of my entries):

" it was a small catharsis to read what i didn't yet know that i felt, so beautifully delineated in your prose. which i always thought had a limpid quality that cuts straight through to the heart. if there is one reason for living it is that by living and writing (and i think for you they are synonymous) you help us all by trying to navigate the universe of the unknowable through words. they are the only thing we have, and you are one of the few who know how to use them. you cannot be lost!"

and a sudden flushing shame as i read those words again - they are written about a different person. for i haven't used words well, have long lost the beauty of words. have been afraid to write about beautiful things, and have been afraid to write beautifully. now i am merely one of the lost. in these last years, as in the millay poem - my heart was the little tepid pool, drying inward from the edge (since your love died.)

i keep looking back at this entry i was writing in widener - and the second half of it - all of it - still shakes me - it is the most honest thing i've said to myself about the past, the most clear-eyed understanding of the damage done.

the facility for joy is something that people always recognise in me, and that i've always given freely. but i don't think anyone can say that of me in these past three years, or remember a time i was always so. it all seems so long ago.

"the facility for joy is connected intimately to the writing and creative life - and when the heart is a mangled mass, when the eyes are darkened - we are incapable of, and afraid of, beauty. there is only submerged meaning, only the careful numbness of survival - all experience and all words only glance off the intellect, no more."