Tuesday.
It is so easy in a sense to be confessional, so difficult to write on more general themes. I borrow the idea, in part, from something I read in passing at the bookstore, from an introduction to Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. My own tendency is to wander into personal daydream and get lost in the navel-gazing pursuit, without there ever being much girth to my thought. It is the more undisciplined state: when I try to think on something else, something big – political stories in the news, for example – I notice my brain straining, making an effort, feeling like the cogs that creep in a poem by Theodore Roethke. But then it is premature to call thoughts of this kind small or vain or coquettish. Of course they can tend toward idleness (mine surely do), but then sometimes you can see something of the universal in the narrow moments of a domestic life. Consider the novels of Jane Austen, and you will find that some very great and serious themes – love and family and morality – come out of pages of balls and romantic missives and strolls through the garden. And then Blake speaks of a world in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wild flower.
Nonetheless, I do not shake my fear. My concern probably treats of a slightly different question, really, and there is the rub. Smallness is not the same as selfness, and the thing I fear is a junction of the two. It is hard to dismiss suspicions of small-mindedness when, sitting down to write, my impulse is to begin every new phrase with I. Let this last sentence be judged a direct rejoinder to that vexing whim.