"Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound": From the Cave of the Winds

I shall resume this journal shortly. Just let me get the water out of my ears . . .

I am heading back to Wales after a month in New York City and State. Upon my return, I shall try to catch up with myself, reviewing a few of the shows I have seen (Gypsy, again, A Catered Affair, and Attorney for the Damned, starring an old friend of mine), opening some of the books I have bought, and reporting from places I’ve visited (Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx and Elmira; Ithaca, on a Silent Movie night on which we were treated to a film made in Ithaca in 1915, featuring a young Oliver Hardy; FDR’s home near Hyde Park; Fleischmanns in the Catskills, where a young Gertrude Berg spent her summers in her father’s hotel; and, obviously, Niagara Falls, where I thought of Robert Southey’s “Cataract of Lodore,” from which I borrowed a line).

The rush of experience is not necessarily enhanced by reflections in tranquility; but retrospection tends to improve on the performance of expressing it—especially after extensive editing.