I have no heart for the work at hand. Not the library work, not the life work, not the teaching work. I want to have a tall stack of books beside me as I sit in a comfortable chair reading for the whole day and I want to be going outside and drinking juice and talking long walks to shake out my bones.

The present will not slow down and the future, which must be planned somehow, keeps barreling forward and still I haven�t the gumption to just give up this place, finally. I need to, in fact, I need to do it today. I have, you see, been offered a summer class (two in fact: summer classes) to teach and today I have set myself the task of turning them down. It feels like sealing my fate to do so and I am horribly reluctant to turn my back on the future that would leave me here in my comfortable but lonesome (so so lonesome) life. I may put it off another day.

After dropping dear Bath at the airport yesterday morning I sunk. I was flat and wet with despair. I went to the lake and ran and then I filled out again, was me again. I am frightened at the prospect of not having my place of retreat. I am frightened of surrounding myself with people, because I see how I must, often, be solitary. I do not want to be so frightened. I don�t want to passively let the future decide itself, but how to make such plans? How how how?

The day promises to be another miracle. I promise to wear myself out again this afternoon because it is the only way to quiet the great and overwhelming unease.

I have just returned from break. I saw Frances and Jeff downstairs and we chatted and I checked out two books which Bathsheba says I must read (The Secret History and Cold Mountain). I must get to work here. There is so much to be done.

The problem with spring is that it reminds me, like a sense memory, of how terribly sad I was a year ago and I feel that sorrow creeping in at unexpected moments. I am endeavoring to make it all new and perhaps that is reason enough to leave, to find some other place, a place not so immediately ripe with the scent of all my worst days.