My routine this winter has been to Go to the gym very late like 2 or 3 in the morning after S has fallen asleep, and to take a hot bath afterwards and then to fall asleep myself and then wake up late myself *11 or 12am).
Last night, we went out for dinner with friends and then had a small group over here at our apartment in front of the fireplace. It was nice and I read from a passage from Hardy’s Return of the Native describing the lighting of bonfires in rural England—opening the book almost at random and find a passage of elegiac beauty unlike anything I find in fiction today.
And when everyone left and I sobered up, I went to work out, and today I woke up feeling pretty exhausted, which makes sense, I guess; S had already gone to work and I had a million things to do—writing deadlines, big professional obligations—but…
I need to carve out an hour to drink coffee and to read and write, to write this diary, to think. It's really in the hour before bed, hour after I wake up, that I try togive myself time to think about the big, sublime things; I've gone through a lot of religious moods this winter: periods of atheism and reductionism, periods of Gnosticism and kind of eerie certainty that the world is made by Demiurgic aliens; periods of orthodoxy and prayer; periods of confusion; periods of kind of Emersonian Unitarian defiance and self-reliance.
I guess this is part of just preparing to get married and looking ahead in a new way; not looking back towards youth anymore or not clinging to it, not quite in the same way I used to.