From my Great-Uncle Will’s journal, dated April 25, 1928.

Walked down to Five Points this afternoon for tobacco and a headache powder. The day was warm, bright, and full of promise the way spring afternoons are wont to be: promise that will be dashed on summer’s soggy shores and autumn’s rocky cliffs, to say nothing of winter’s jagged shales, but (the human capacity for self-delusion being as vast as my Uncle Robert’s appetite for pie) I could ignore that eternal truth under the influence of blue sky and budding trees.

I could ignore it, that is to say, until I crossed the threshold of the drug store. Read on

From my Great-Uncle Will’s journal, dated October 17, 1928. I’m bowing to the demands of relentless obscurity, as Will himself might say, by footnoting this one.

Olsen wandered into my office this afternoon, during that long lull between the renewal of lunch and the renewal of evening, the dreary middle age of the day, the two and three o’clocks when time grows soggy with use and sags like paunch, or laundry. Olsen, too, appeared a little soggy, and not only from the rain. He hoped tacitly if no less openly for another drink, glancing repeatedly at the drawer where he believes I keep my flask. I pretended not to notice nor to understand, for a ream of essays awaited his departure, and however their grim prospect might tempt even Carrie Nation to the solace of a still, no liquor can dull the pain of their tumid ungrammatical prose. Seventeen vapid analyses of the Aeneid will all too easily elicit tears without the loosening effect of whiskey, and I feel that one of us, at least, ought to approach the project in a mood of sobriety. Read on

Most of my Great-Uncle William’s diary is filled with references to poetry, classical literature, and his own history, which makes it difficult to post individual entries. I’m fond of this one, though, and it’s timely, and not nearly so obscure as most. Forgive me if I don’t footnote; it would spoil it, I think.

Another mild day, of which to my taste there have been far too many this winter, for they tempt the mind to wander. The sharp cold of a decent winter day hones the mind, but the promise of spring invites imagination, and a surfeit of imagination is not always, even for a poet (especially for a failed poet) a happy thing. If the feet, too, wander, as mine did, not stopping at my office after teaching this afternoon but continuing on northward to the town’s end and beyond, they may kick an unmoored stone into some dark pool of memory better left still but which the undisciplined mind is only too glad to stir. Had only my mind wandered I would have passed a useless but not unpleasant afternoon staring out the window of my office. Only the feet would have led me onward past the tree, which I had countless times passed on similar walks, but whose bare bones silhouetted in winter’s sinking light now became in a careless moment the old oak on my grandfather’s farm: not the stately companion in the yard that welcomed guests and shielded the parlor from the midday sun but the gnarled ancient by the pond in whose shade the cows lounged and my own assigned work languished. There, too, my feet and my mind once wandered. Read on

Slept poorly all this week. I have given some consideration to becoming nocturnal. The nights though still cold are merely bracing rather than truly frigid, at least to one whose blood was early thickened by Pennsylvania winters and a father’s parsimony in matters of hearth-fuel, and I find the nocturnal company at least as enjoyable as any available during the day — increasingly so as the weather warms, for each year about this time the tree frogs emerge from hibernation. The first half-teaspoonful of spring awakens their amphibian yearnings, as I suppose it would have mine in earlier decades, and they spend the quickening nights chirping lustily at one another. Read on

I was going to write something utterly brilliant this past weekend, but I caught some sort of walking flu and wasn’t up to the task. Great-Uncle William will have to speak for me.

Mrs. Jacobs next door has learned of my illness — how, I cannot imagine, for I told no one except the department secretary whom I instructed to cancel my classes. But my neighbor seems to know all of little consequence that occurs within ten minutes’ brisk walk; were there profit in front-porch chatter and back-fence whispers she would be renting rooms to the Dukes. So prolific is she in the casual exchange of the commonplace that she must take inspiration from one of those lesser muses the Greeks never mentioned but of whose existence I am nonetheless certain: Phluaronia, perhaps, who having arrived late to the table of creativity found the feast already ravished by her more famous sisters and so can spur her victims only to bubble continually with nonsense. Her statues, had any been made, were fountains spewing water from their mouths into a pool which their feet, submerged therein, drank up anew as if from sparkling subterranean springs. A kind woman, Mrs. Jacobs, but — Good God.

At nine-thirty this morning she knocked upon my door and when I answered, unwashed, unshaven and unshod, she said with a mother bird’s sympathy and a schoolmarm’s assessing eye, “Oh Mister Warmkessel, I understand you have taken ill.” Read on