Ann is gone for the weekend, a change of pace for us both. I imagined dozens of things I might do, things I should do. Mostly they are things I don't do alone much anymore. I thought of going to a movie alone, going to the market and wandering through the fruit stands alone, going dancing, renting some porn, spending a stretch of time going through accumulated junk in my apartment, inviting a stranger into my bedroom — I did none of these things, but I've had a pleasant time, nevertheless, being alone. I love time alone, yet when the time is presented to me, I meet it as though it were an impossible burden to be filled with countless activities. I'm glad it's an event for me, made possible only by her otherwise abiding presence in my life.

Lately my mind has been foggy. I've been unfocused and inarticulate. Ann called me this evening, and I could do nothing but stammer in confused, choppy phrases. I've been like this lately. I imagine she is tolerant of it, but wishes it would go away. If mental states are like basements, I want a mind sparsely inhabited by only the most valued stored possessions, and otherwise bare, clean floors, walls freshly painted with glossy white sealant. Instead I have dusty card-boarded clutter, bare light bulbs swinging from electrical wire, and decades worth of cob webs due to dryers which are not vented to the outside.

Rorem wrote this: "So impending are deadlines... that I grow hysterical. Reasoned essays to complete, piano practice for three recitals, music to be composed—all waited for, all expected to be of my 'usual caliber.' Toward what does such panic impel me, beyond writing this useless paragraph? Passed the morning moronically studding an orange with a thousand cloves." I do such moronic things all the time. And write (truly) useless paragraphs.

Rorem at multiple points throughout the diary notes that his standard of productivity in a year is about an hour's worth of music. This strikes me as meaningful. In some significant way the year for him is measured by that hour of composed music. All else is filler, the daily stir of activities, people, and talk, and of course, moronic nonsense. I have much the same attitude about most of my daily activities and duties, but without the hour's worth of artistic output to show at the end. What I care about are the things I'm listening to, the things I'm reading—recently read passages of Proust, the emotionally satisfying third movement of the newly recorded piece for two pianos by John Adams, the Rorem diaries, newly discovered details about David Diamond—these are the things I care about. But such attitudes are the luxury of artists. The rest of us must care about our daily grind, I'm afraid. I don't, and it's a problem. It's cliché to say that we must keep our eye on life's essentials, the things that really matter. I think I have the opposite problem. Not that I'm always thinking about love, friends, and family. Not at all. But I am always thinking about things utterly unrelated to and far removed from my daily life.

Rorem wrote this too. "'A bas Sartre, a bas Boulez, a bas Couperin,' one hears the French kids cry. One doesn't hear American kids cry 'Down with Goodman, down with Cage, down with Gottschalk,' because they've never heard of these men, much less Sartre, Boulez, or Couperin. Which is not to boast the superiority of French culture. The humblest French concierge knows the names, if not the works, of his country's cultural heroes for two thousand years, and is proud, while we, in a pinch, may know the names of Hemingway or Mailer (though not their works), but strictly as folk heroes." After reading this again, though, I'm not sure there's much to it. Still, am I just getting old and stodgy in wishing that we Americans knew and cared more about our cultural icons. In music at least, Americans know next to nothing about their heritage.

Rorem notes that Mahler met Charles Ives on a visit to America in the early 1900s. That seems bizarre for some reason.