112

the sleeve of his robe so as not to wake the young man who slept by his side. When the Emperor died soon after, however, the chief minister Wang Mang forced Tung Hsien to commit suicide.

Cold Mountain - poem by Han-shan trans. by Burton Watson p26

6.29.80

The Optimists Daughter - Eudora Welty - 1972

"And all Laurel had felt and known in the night, all she'd remembered, and as much as she could understand this morning - in the week at home, the month, in her life - could not tell her now how to stand and face the person whose own life had not taught her how to feel." p173

Experience did, finally, get set into its right order, which is not always the order of other people's time.

p174

113

"But of course, Laurel saw it was Fay who did not know how to fight. For Fay was without any powers of passion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person. Other people, inside their lives, might as well be invisible to her. To find them, she could only strike out those little fists at random, or spit from her little mouth. She could no more fight a feeling person than she could love him."

p178

Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.

p179

8.20.80

In Chekov's stories, reality always has its origin: it comes to us through the living human being - and not anonymously. It lives, was born, in the particular - not in