Activity

28 September

Today when I got to school Miss Lewis said it was important for people to do their own work and what was she to think when she found that five other children had 111 × 111 and 1111 × 1111 and 11111 × 11111 on their addition sheets. I said they would appear to have used the distribu…

I said, ‘Well, I have only read the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek and De Amicitia and Metamorphoses 1–8 in Latin and Moses and the Bullrushes and Joseph and his Manycoloured Coat and Jonah and I Samuel in Hebrew and Kalilah wa Dimnah and 31 Arabian Nights in Arabic and just Yaortu la Tortue and Ba…

For the next seven and a half hours Yamamoto played Op. 10 No. 1 in D minor, & sometimes he seemed to play it exactly the same five times running but next to the sound of a bell or an electric drill or once even a bagpipe and sometimes he played it one way next to one thing and another way next to …

A week went by. I have heard it said that small children have no powers of concentration. What in God’s name is to keep a small child from concentrating on something? L anyway was a monomaniac. He would leap out of bed at 5:00 in the morning, put on four or five sweaters, go downstairs to get out h…

My admirer says that’s wonderful & that it’s so important for small children to have a sense of achievement, & then drawing me slightly aside says that all the same it’s important to keep a sense of proportion, one needs to strike a balance, dangerous to carry things to extremes, moderation in all …