Minnesota 13.6.1993: Marauding Wind, Bowls of Sky

En route to Minnesota for the performance of Copland’s “Tender Land” at Louis’s farm. We spent the night in Knoxville, and are now a few miles south of Mt. Vernon, Illinois. A journey from dark, misty, tree-shrouded hills to more and more sky, land so flat the sky can only be a bowl over it, the sun an imperious lamp-lord, the wind a fierce, prowling marauder.

As my purple prose may hint, I want to read. Suddenly, hungrily, as I write this, Willa Cather. But also a whole self-indulgent spate of English novels from the early 1900s, like Zuleika Dobson (again)—froth to drug and dull me to the world’s pain. And for some reason (again) Balzac’s Comédie Humaine. Dare I try it in French this time around?