1/16/45

[...] I have a candle on my coffee table, candles are so beautiful at midday, with the snow’s gray glare and the gloom of the room on the side away from the windows. Henry James sits on a shelf, inviting me to forget my brief and unimportant day and stay with him in a slow moving, rarified world which I know will leave me clean, belonging finally to no time and no place. The radio plays bassoon sonatas. The potential pleasure of this morning, this day, which I feel only in anticipation, is more intoxicating than any substance or any physical sight. Merely to exist is an ecstatic pleasure. How inadequate are all these words, when the physical sensation now makes me taut, wanting to shout, laugh, leap around my room, and at the same time be quiet and learn and feel all I can!