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aware of the depth of my despair at growing old and feeling my age.… Barbara Wheeler, oldest of the women who are my daughters, reports that Elizabeth warned her that she would find End Zone very, very dour. ‘It is like reading through chocolate pudding,’ said Elizabeth.
    Why do old people so often hide their deepest despair? Is it unpopular, unsociable perhaps, to confess that one hates being old? The more acceptable stance is cheery acceptance, ‘The best is yet to be’ proclamations, the happy assurances of sanguinity. And if old people do not feel this, they find it more politic to profess it.
    The Sunday New York Times Book Review arrived today (Tuesday). A biography of the Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has appeared. Vaguely I remember his only novel, The Leopard , a large and, I recall, fascinating but difficult book which I read years ago but cannot now remember clearly. It appeared a few months after his death and sold extraordinarily well—fifty-two printings in its first year, I learn from the review.
    I have always wondered about big, serious, well-praised novels that have large sales. In their first year, they seem to appear on coffee tables in every literate, well-to-do household. Are they bought and then read? Or are they displayed as witnesses to the fact that the owners aspire to a certain level of ‘culture’? Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is such a book. Two years after its publication it began to arrive among the used volumes Sybil bought for Wayward Books. Copies of the first printing that she acquired were in surprisingly good shape, dust jackets intact, a sign, I believe, that they had served more for decoration or display than reading matter.
    Early this morning thick fog from the sea arrived to obscure the wild field in front of our house. Its very existence seemed to be threatened. Death must be an atmosphere like this: the slow approach (‘on little cat feet,’ Sandburg said of fog, but to me today it appeared more like the claw feet of tigers) of dim, impenetrable, grey-fog light, until it turns into the dark, fills one’s throat and ears, closes one’s eyes (Emily Dickinson: ‘And then I could not see to see’), and then obliterates existence itself.
    The fog remains throughout the day, deadening even the activity in my study. I write nothing of interest or use in the novel, and instead of battling my infertility I settle into the old rocker beside the unlit wood stove (fog outside often makes an indoor room seem warm, somehow) to read, as desultorily as I was writing. I pull from the shelf a volume of John Ruskin’s Choice Selections published by John Wiley in New York in 1884. Out of it falls a leather bookmark I must have put there sometime in the seventies when I was a contributing editor to the Saturday Review . It is embossed with a finger pointing upward and contains the admonition KNOW THY PLACE .
    At last, after so many years of spiritual wandering, I know mine. It is here, in this study or on this deck, whether in productivity or blockage, in bright sunlight or fog, in autumn/fall, but always in sight of the infinitely varied Cove.
    Next day: Surprisingly, I find I am caught by Ruskin. I remember finding him hard to read for any length of time when I was in graduate school. Now I have grown more patient with writing on ethical subjects, a sign of age, I imagine. For instance, he advises me that ‘Man’s use and function … are to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.’ I like the adjective ‘reasonable’ here.
    Or again, in a selection titled ‘Man’s Business in Life,’ Ruskin says it is ‘first, to know themselves and the existing state of things they have to do with, secondly, to be happy in themselves, and in the existing state of things, and thirdly, to mend themselves and the