As a prelude to regular journaling, I found this

In one notebook, only the first eight pages were used. The remaining pages remained blank. Somehow, I was now at Indiana University, Bloomington.

I’m confused about the time of these entries. Page 2 opens, “Tiempo comes out this week: it is beautiful, austere, and masculine. Will the effort to excise the cobwebs, the Romantic [Victorian?} cancer from this God-forsaken place be worth the effort?” On page 4 there’s a bracketed [November 14] entry, “at breakfast time, the puddle was frozen. At lunchtime, a butterfly flitted in sunlight; I thought it was a falling leaf.”

Yet the entries have me suspecting the entries might actually be from early spring or later, when my love life was in turmoil. The only notation on the opening page was a pathetic: “Poem to Nicki. Can I be your older brother / if I cannot be your lover?”

There’s also a description of our visiting Toad Hall with my sister and our driving to Bedford, with the Hoosier hills creased by naked trees and framed by blocks of farmed fields, rocks cut away by creeks, golden fallen leaves, and yellow cut limestone. Also, Cezanne quarries with mottled gray skies.

Still, these details also would fit November.

~*~

My reading stack included Steppenwolf, which I read half-drunk on one of my first bottles of wine, as well as Leviathan, Dark Ghetto, Hostettler’s Amish Society, Morning Watch, Einstein on Mozart’s piano concerti, the usual studies grind, Neibuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, and the Kerner Report.

Story idea: Levithan (or the perfect ruler): the sovereign as an omniscient computer. [Remember, this was at the end of the ‘60s!]

~*~

My primary focus was on Nikki or, more accurately, her absence. In the years since, I had forgotten that we had ongoing struggles long before the final split.

“The library on Saturday night is quiet: a great escape from couples.”

[I see I was using colons the way I now use dashes. One seems literary, the other journalistic, often as a substitute for parentheses.]

Sunday morning is for the purest music: Mozart piano concertos, the Shostakovich preludes, Herbie Mann, Beethoven’s sixth.

And then:

“This week has been weird. Nikki’s decision [whatever that was], then all night Wednesday after our tearful walk. My feeling suicidal playing dodge ‘em with cars. The beauty of being together, skin against skin, her breasts pressed into my arms. Pale sunrise, lavender against blue. Gut-torn scars exposed again. The same lines Fay gave. ‘But I’ll still want to know where you are, too, and know what you’re doing.’ ”

[Funny, neither of them followed up long on that.]

“She is so fucked up, makes herself unhappy when she should be the happiest,” despite the humor that makes my friends think she is so funny. … but I really don’t know her yet. …

“Her chemistry is different. She smells and tastes so different from other girls. Maybe it’s Jewish.” Hmm: “Fay and I had an unspoken language Nicki & I don’t. But Nicki is more human, more sensitive, more the artist and intellectual.”

More the child, actually. If only she would grow up Yet “she stabilized me …”

“Running the door into Paul, the pianist who has never heard of Von Karajan, as he carried hot chocolate.” Who was this guy in my dorm?

Or Jack, “who does not understand literature. I read him a few excerpts from Steppenwolf and understood nothing. Intellectual jerk.”

~*~

Artists do not make contented cows on the sidewalk.

As I was going to buy a baby-congratulations card:

Who might the mother have been? Kathy H?

three blue baby buggies
pushed by three
student-type mothers

Now I see that Nikki and I were having troubles before my trip to Florida. The trip, even so, went swimmingly.

Vietnam
Love it
Or leave it

Other bits:

The worst profs I’ve had hold doctorates from Ivy League schools.

One poly sci course offering was about why politicians must tell lies, keeping their constituencies in ideology and darkness.

Two nights a row, meatloaf. On third day, at lunch. The dieticians serve what no one else would dare do.

The best part of any book is the last half. The author has laid all his piddly groundwork: he is now ready to move, if he can.

Really?

Trout Fishing in America: big writing now. [Maybe this was my first awareness of the work, from a reference in Newsweek or Time, rather than actually having the book, something I think happened in my Montana trip in the spring of ’70, after graduation, about the time I started journaling seriously.]

This campus is filled with a bunch of would-bes: would-be writers, would-be lawyers, would-be scientists, all pretending and preventing others from getting ahead. Rah, mediocrity!

Conversation with V.O.: basis of Hobbes and of Kantian ethics is an assumption that good and the maintenance of the state are one and the same. … His wife is teaching what looks like a fantastic course on urban affairs, very problem-oriented …

Make every minute count. It will soon add up.

“I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.” – last words of Adolph Eichmann, Nazi leader.

Her family’s Lake Worth rural route address and phone number occupied my back page. The ranch was essentially West Palm Beach.

~*~

From Spiralbound Daffodil, with commentary from now.