The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) by John Cheever

these carven cavernous and not cold days of spring. The smell of fish skin and bloodworms; the chill water.
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    One of the children had a toothache in the middle of the night. Mary got water and aspirin. Her patient, sleepy voice. The sense, then, that one was face-to-face with transcendent patience. Many of the promises have been broken, etc., but here, like the ability to rise to love, like the strength summoned in the throes of childbirth, there is a patience, there is a calmness of spirit and mind that seems womanly and transcendent. It is two in the morning. She gets an aspirin and draws a glass of water. Everything is unhappy, broken, insubstantial, but for an hour it doesn’t matter at all. And for Eben the rain falls on the roofs of the houses where his enemies are asleep. Under the roofs on which he hears the rain fall strangers and enemies are sleeping. In the noise of the rain he hears the slippers coming downstairs and the boots mounting. For Eben the rain, even the rain, falls into the grass of a hostile and foreign country.
       New York on a summer night. How many lights are burning? A man sits on the front steps of the public library wearing no coat and no shoes and a dark felt hat. His shoes are beside him on the marble step.
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    Now I resent the tiredness of my mind, from having drunk too much; I resent the craving for some erotic tenderness that is the only end, the only beauty for these days. Seeing an elderly man and woman having breakfast with their son—who may be taking summer courses at N.Y.U.—I yearned to discharge with competence and strength the responsibilities of a family man, to carve for my children something that has moral splendor—I glimpsed the lacks I show in turning my daughter’s loneliness into a poor anecdote—in asking advice everywhere. And with my mouth tasting of old wine, and with this gray sky, I find it so hard not to be incredulous in recalling the wonderful hours and days in the mountains, the cleanliness, P. coming back to the house with her flowers, the breadth of the view, swimming in cold water, making love under a thin roof; and I think now of the months that I have longed to write a story that will be fine, that will be singing, that will have in it all kinds of lights and pleasures.
    As for failure and despair, they seem aggravated by the climate oNew York and the suburbs. Both New York and Scarborough seem in some cases to produce an egotism that needs the health and vigor of youth and an imitation of these energies when they are gone themselves. In both places there are portents of the abyss, and now and then you hear the voices and glimpse the faces of the fallen. Waiting to get your fried egg in a dirty cafeteria, you see, through the window between the counter and the kitchen, an old man bent over a stove. He is dressed in a loose white shift—prisoner’s garb—and his face is sullen and bitter. “It is quite cool out,” the baby-sitter says, handing you her seamy furs, and you recognize at once in the grayness of her face and the elegance of her voice that she has come to you from the abyss. The house that the A.s rented at the corner of Alewives Lane is empty again. They struggled for a year and left in the middle of the night, leaving unpaid bills everywhere. But in New Hampshire there are no portents, no manifestations of the abyss, no obligations to imitate the energies of youth, no dread of falling, of loneliness and disgrace, and the smell of wood smoke and the noise of the wind have a direct bearing on our lives. There we understand calmly how we live and how we change. Think of the autumn twilights; think of the old woman cutting her flowers, think of the roar of the purple sea on the island beaches.
    A Sunday afternoon; a little rain in the village. A man practicing a violin. On the heels of the rain, dense humidity. Walking over to the C.s’ for dinner. A young man with a suitcase, hurrying down Fifth Avenue. A dressy Englishwoman