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    Read Bell’s Virginia Woolf . ¶ Fine book.
     
    How fortunate for Virginia that she had Leonard—! Without him, who knows?
    […]
     
    July 7, 1974. …Out West to Aspen, Colorado, to the Humanities Institute. 8000' above sea level. Many fascinating people; music festival; mountain climbers; physicists. I think this will be my last public reading since it went so well: I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
     
    August 7, 1974. … Death-Festival now called The Assassins . Gradually taking shape. A small mountain of notes…. Hugh Petrie, cruel at first then, gradually, sympathetic. I hadn’t wished to put so much of myself into him.
     
    Synthesis of realism, symbolism; the mas. & the fem; Marxist-socialist-protest critique & depth psychology. Experience of art as religious revelation. Otherwise of no interest.
     
    Art as the highest activity of the Soul.
     
    September 15, 1974. School year, as always, tumultuous. Conrad—Lawrence—Faulkner seminar looks challenging. (Too many students, however.)
     
    First issue of Ontario Review out soon. Ray has worked very, very hard.
     
    An avalanche of work: people: impressions: stimuli. Day following day, blending dizzily into a kind of seamless expansion of time. Timelessness? Immersed in life, one simply loses track of details.
     
    October 15, 1974. Returned from two days at Yale. “Visiting Writer.” Guest of Calhoun College—R. and I in rooms above the Master’s residence—in signing the guest-book, were impressed (as one must be) by previous guests: W. H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, Northrop Frye, Norman Mailer, acquaintance Tony Tanner of Cambridge; and others. What was not impressive was the place itself—the incessant banging overhead, noise on the stairs and in the courtyard—endearingly drunken undergraduates—phonographs turned up high (classical music, at least, but militaristic and thumping). Is this the reward of a kind of fame? And how did Auden like staying here?
     
    Moved to the Sheraton-Hilton after a miserable, sleepless night. I, who feel uneasy with luxury, who prefer “simple” surroundings, am continually moving to a Sheraton-Hilton, moving out of guest accommodations and the presumably simple surroundings others like. Would have felt apologetic about it, but why?
     
    Though we live in jest, we die in earnest.
     
    A year ago, R. and I drove to Washington, D. C., to participate in a conference sponsored by the Kennedy Foundation. Stayed at the Sheraton-Hilton. Many floors up, but still noisy. Washington itself far more attractive than we had dared hope. Nixon in the White House then: but the “White House” of tourist experience is just a museum crammed with odds and ends, some very bad art, a few surprises (a Monet above a fireplace, John F. Kennedy’s gift to the White House). In a VIP group, taken for an endless tour by an automaton-like guide, smiling and chattery. I could have endured it, but R. gave out suddenly; insisted that we slip beneath one of the velvet ropes and escape, which we did. The joys of sudden liberation…. Suddenly, unexpectedly, to slip free of a tedious obligation, to hurry out into the (autumnal) sunlight, hand in hand…. Romantic lovers fleeing legitimate pain, the real thing, are not so joyfully liberated as R. and I are commonly, one might almost say daily .
     
    Eunice and Sargent Shriver were our hosts, the conference itself quite interesting, though the panel—eight or nine “experts”—was too large. Had the good fortune to meet Robert Coles, however. * Marvelous man. The trip to Washington was not a loss. We were gathered together to discuss the ethics of government interference with private life (attempting to control population growth among the poor or retarded), one of the very few points at which orthodox Catholicism might touch upon the standard issues of civil liberties. Discuss it we did, some of us sympathetic with thepoor and deprived; others (awkwardly, they tended to be those who dealt with