Saturday Morning

It is early morning, the rain is beating down on the house, and although I cannot see this at the moment, knocking down the stands of luscious tulips that have made the various garden boxes glow.  That is in the nature of spring in New England, bouts of quite cold weather, making the experience of the garden a challenge, interspersed with torrential downpours and strong winds that leave whatever you might have braved the cold to go to look for in the garden utterly destroyed.  And once you have digested the salutary lesson on the impermanence of all things, Nature provides a coda to the so-called spring season with the onset of cruelly hot and humid days.  The sense of helplessness that these events inspire is augmented this year by the unremitting process of "depersonalizing" our house which we have now nearly finished at the behest of the real estate agent who insists that this process will make the place no longer a dwelling but now a house instantly salable.  I feel uncomfortable in these empty rooms, the depersonalizing has worked so well, that I no longer really sense myself to be anything at all. Perhaps then it was a mistake today while waiting for the arrival of this morning's New York Times to browse through back issues of The London Review and the Times Literary Supplement which have been piling up as I am otherwise so energetically engaged, and which have been stored away in a dresser drawer for fear they too much betray my personality and would offend the real estate agent.  So I have been having what is off and on a depressing feeling that occurs when I read these journals, the feeling that I am more and more losing touch.  For one thing I find the prose more and more impenetrable or burdensome, either not comprehending all that I read or not carrying to make the effort to understand.  The feeling of inadequacy derived from that experience is augmented by my realization as I go along that I am not going to remember the titles of so many items of real interest, titles of books that I should make some effort to get hold of to read.  I am not going to make lists because in the process of clearing out my desk in the past few weeks I have come across envelopes filled with three by five cards with lists of titles taken from my reading from the past four or five years, a defeating discovery, equal to the realization again and again as I read back issues of these journals that I have not discarded that I have read them previously.  This morning in fact I was reading the review of a biography of Richard Haggart only suddenly to grow dimly aware that I had read another review of this book which had led me to buy it for my Kindle, that is, my flying, subway riding, train going, and waiting in doctors' offices reading, and indeed I had read all or part of it, none of which could I remember.  And I have just  read a glowing review of Claudio Pavone's account of the Italian civic breakdown in 1943 now translated into English and know that I would love to read it, but know that I will not, I will lose the reference to the book, and I am too much in transit right now to organize my thoughts, and then as well, I would probably forget what I had read in it shortly after the reading.  These are melancholy thoughts, the rain continues to pour  down, I will find something light to eat for breakfast and pack up the last of the DVDs and maybe then I will feel better.