Another beautiful day, but chill...

Here on Weems Creek the air is still, the water calm, the sun bright, the sky a little wispy with veils of mist high up making the light seem to come from everywhere.

• Sunday, Nov 14. A beautiful day, clear and sunny with little wind.
  
• Sunday we drove into DC for church at St. Mark's. After, we had lunch at Cosi on Pennsylvania Ave. with Penny Hansen, Sr. Warden, to discuss our past year at St. Mark's. where we are and where we're going. I think she was afraid that we are going out and not coming back. I hope we reassured her that that is not the case, that we've been looking around a bit in Annapolis and always come back to St. Mark's for the preaching, the teaching.
• After driving back to Annapolis we rested for a while at home.
  
• Then, in the late afternoon, we went to the Caritas Society's Meet the Authors event at St John's. I generally avoid these events, but Michael Dirda, one of my personal heroes was to speak and I wanted to see him in the flesh. I've been reading his columns in the Washington Post for years and have come to depend on his wit, his acumen, his apparently vast knowledge of literature and everything it touches upon. I made sure to read his column in the morning before going to church, as I try to do every Sunday.
  
• The event was much better than I had expected. The two other authors who spoke were both interesting and spoke well and all answered questions thoughtfully.
  
• Dirda's new book is about growing up in central Ohio in the 50's and 60's as a bookish kid and teenager and going off to college at Oberlin where he first began to blossom. In his talke he told a wonderful story about how he persuaded his mother to buy him a complete set of the Great Books, promising to win the $500 prize offered by the company, if she would make the $375 investment. She did and he did, as well as his sisters also winning prizes, ultimately to the tune of $2,500!
  
• After the presentations the authors sat at tables in the FSK Lobby to answer questions and sign their books. Nancy bought me each of the authors' books, much to my surprise. Dirda chatted with us very easily, and mentioned Walter Benjamin in passing, leading us to tell him of Karl's interest as a leader of the International Benjamin Society. He signed the book to Karl as a fellow devotee of Benjamin and in the process made a mess in the book with his pen - and, to make it up to us, gave me another of his books, a set of essays: Readings - Essays and Literary Entertainments. I've read most of the latter now and dipped into the autobiography a bit - much prefer the Readings as they are each a finished piece in itself. The other book is more extended, less thoroughly written. But in both I am learning more about Dirda and myself - and why at least part of the resonance is so powerful.
  
• He tells stories of becoming a library borrower, of getting to the "adult" books, of reading series and endlessly and looking for guidance in his reading.
  
• As I looked through a list that he prepared when he was 16 of books he had read, I got to the ciatation, "Plato (parts)", and was suddenly transported to my first encounter with Plato. I was baby sitting at the farm home of the Rogers, family friends who raised goats, kept dogs and horses, and had many children. As the children had all gone to bed, I was looking through the bookcase at the foot of the stairs and saw Plato's Republic.I felt a thrill of something forbidden, I'm not quite sure why, of something that I had seen referenced in other books I had read, as something a bit both bizarre and threatening, as a book that should not be read by children. I took the book down and opened it to the opening scene. I was gone from the farmhouse, gone from Maryland, I was on that walk back up from the Piraeus with Socrates and his friends. I don't know how much of the Republic I read that night, but I do remember the sense of magic, of being transported to another world.
  
• More other worlds: Dirda became a reader of fantasy, science fiction, the Hardy Boys, and mysteries as a growing youth. I never made my way into the cult of mysteries, largely because my mother loved to read them and I somehow thought that one mystery addiction was enough - I'd learned a lot from her, but I didn't much want to share in that. But science fiction - when Dirda alluded to Corwainer Smith, a name I thought I'd forgotten, and the thrills of his stories, again, I felt that sense of ahhh, so that's why I feel so needy to read his column every Sunday. And these little moments of recognition kept coming as I read more and more. Also, the stunning lack on my part of real understanding of literature, especially next to a Dirda who ultimately finished a PhD in, I think, comparative literature. And he has taught, ah well.
• Yesterday, Monday, was a beautiful day - a bit cold, but not too much wind. In the morning there was frost on the yard and covering the cars. By midday it had burned off and was almost balmin, perhaps near 60.
• At yoga class last night Mary was back and worked us very hard on backbends. It was a good class. I learned a few things about muscles I didn't know I had, i.e., I felt work going on in parts of my anatomy that were unfamiliar, around the upper hips and again the shoulders, even though we were mostly reviewing familiar asanas. As we spent more time in them, and Mary talked to us about what to do, to tweak this or that, we got to spend enough time hanging out in one body part or another to actually begin to learn something new.
• At home, after class, Nancy had cooked a very nice dinner with various leftovers, from a balti dish to the revived tuna provençale.
  
• In bed, I read for a while in GULAG, the book by another of the Caritas authors, Anne Applebaum, like Dirda, both a Post writer and a Pultizer Prize winner. It was not as much fun as the Dirda, as her evocation of the horrors of the Russian Revolution run counter to my liberal whimsies, my preference for not thinking too much about the evils of the "Evil Empire."
• Today, I need to get myself together to go off the MCIJ, then to pick up a package at Touchstones.
• Thoughts about Dirda and about the movie we saw last week, Ray, keep rising. While watching the movie I was challenged at some point, given a revelation, and, of course, now I'm hiding from it. But it was along the lines of how creative can you be if you don't let yourself be as creative as you can be, how brilliant, how, caring, how all the good things we all want to be can we be unless and until we craft the disciplines and practices into our lives that will make us so. And, so, also, Dirda, who obviously does more than just read. He also digests and studies what he reads so that he can write something worth writing, in a way that is, for others, worth reading. His obsessions, Nabokov, MFK Fisher, Montaigne, Rousseau, Jefferson, Emerson, Shakespeare...