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

of an economic and a sexual content. Barring the admiration that follows pretty women, there is a good deal of tension—true ignorance—in the scrutiny New Yorkers give one another. There is not much geniality or trust in the looks on Madison Avenue. In the morning the river looked cold; it had an inhospitable gleam. Of the families that have been strung along the banks all summer—the mamas and papas and grandpapas and children—sitting in their underwear on folding chairs, swimming and eating and basking in the heat of the sun—there are now left only a few men, most of them old, with scarves around their necks, their hats pulled down to keep their ears warm.
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    Yesterday, cold and rainy. A dark day, a black house, the exacerbating worries of indebtedness. Today the burnished light makes your eyes smart. Polished blue and burnished gold, brimming with brilliance. The north wind, the air smells of water, purple here, green there. The wind came around before dawn. The leaves are piling down. A tumultuous, a harmless wind.
    This house, with its long living room looking north and south so that there are only a few days in the year when the sun enters it, with its pretentious and inefficient equipment, with its jumbled memories, dark and often cold, depresses me and seems to challenge the health I have enjoyed. It is perhaps the closeness of our life here and the dullness we run into when we try to vary it. These habits, these days, like olclothes. Yesterday a day of brilliant light, acoustical brilliance—the ringing of wheels on rails from distant trains sounded clearly. Sinus pains. Drove Ben up the hill to see the sunset, the clear darkness, the hills, the distant lights, the dyed clouds, the lavender-and-lemon-colored sky.
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    Some brief reassessment might be in order. This role was always volatile; but it’s difficult to recall. There was the accumulation of things over two years, self-protests, bad book reviews, a feeling of having grown away from the lamentable influence of my mother, a decrease in the fear of loneliness, and a conviction that most of the conflicts in my disposition are guises of emotional ignorance that I inherited from my parents. I was made so happy that there seemed, in my thinking, to be a trace of hysteria. In the middle of this, the Saul Bellow book had on my mind the power of shock. My identification with it was so deep that I could not judge it sensibly, and there is a grain of legitimate identification here. Then there was sickness, weakness, and the exhaustion I felt when I finished Mrs. Wapshot. There was a sick, rainy day in New York when Lexington Avenue seemed like a catacomb. There are my very legitimate troubles with
The New Yorker
. What it adds up to is that I have never felt so strong and so happy and feared hysteria so deeply. I think that a few days in the mountains would solve all these problems, but I cannot go. And what it adds up to also is that in making such a profound change in the attitudes of my mind, the body may be laggard. I do not have the sweetness of some of the people in question and it is an insupportable strain to aim for it; but I have my own sweetness and I see no reason why coming on this in the forty-first year of my life should undermine my health.
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    Waiting at the R.s’ for Susie to finish her French lesson, with Ben. A northwest wind and a winter twilight, a moon already bright before dusk and a cold night on the way. This hour when we seem caught in the bluff death of the year. The light loses its breadth, but not its clarity or its power. These subtle blues and lemony lights are like the lights of anesthesia, lust, repose. The stars come out and the play of light continues. It is not that the light goes; a dimness falls from the sky oveeverything, obscuring the light. The dimness falls over everything. The cold air makes the dog seem to bark into a barrel. Bright stars, house lights, rubbish fires.
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    Waking and dreaming I seem caught in