When I took Tamas down to the rocks to watch the surf, we had to run back—I was afraid he would be blown into the sea! After writing the poem I spent an hour cutting and reading aloud from As We Are Now for the evening at Notre Dame University when, at their suggestion, I shall take half the hour for that and half for poems. It’s an experiment … I have never before read prose for an audience in such a sustained way. But the book is, as one critic pointed out, a récit, so it should work. I was a little dismayed to see at what a pitch of intensity it lives, that book. Now three years later that kind of intensity, which came from anguish, is so remote that I can hardly imagine how it felt. I am far happier now, but in some ways less alive, and I miss that acute aliveness. I enjoy everything tremendously—the sea, the flowers, my life here, the animals—but I am seldom at the pitch of ecstasy, and I sometimes feel that my mind itself has lost its edge. That is not something that can be changed by will.
