When I put in the dish, it was bliss; it remains bliss. Everyone needs to let the inner child out, to undertake some mildly pleasant activity that absorbs or engages us only a little. Writing leaves me high; I need to come down. Years ago, whiskey did it; but there are side effects: bruises, adultery, liver failure, divorce. Yeats read Zane Grey at night, Eliot Agatha Christie. I do not claim a superior sensibility but junk prose gives me hives. Nor can I sit still for movies or talk shows; but for sports, intellectually equivalent to The Price is Right or Judith Krantz, I sit with my mouth open, witlessly enraptured—as long as I have one other thing to do while watching. When the bliss dish started to deliver, with amusement Jane watched me watching. At first she decided that, having achieved nirvana, I would never strive again. “They’ll say, ‘Whatever became of Hall?’” Then she thought again, and decided that I would use the dish in order to do more work.

First of all I sleep less. I still get up from 4:30 to 5:15 in the morning; I work the same day’s routine, but I used to go to bed at 8:30 or 9:00—reading, getting sleepy, going to sleep. In the old days, I often woke to read from one to two, which I seldom do any more; now, I read another hour in the afternoon, and because I spend less time in bed read and write more hours a day. There are books I dip into between pitches—not Gibbon, not George Herbert—when I need to look through something but fullest attention would go unrewarded. Mostly, I dictate letters. I used to dictate in the late morning or afternoon but now I dictate almost entirely during sporting events (I tell my friends, “It’s tied in the tenth!”) and save the daylight hours for … for work, as I call it. In the low bookcase beside my blue chair, where I sit watching sports, I have secreted a Sony dictator. Every night at 7:30 I fit myself to the TV’s sound by way of an earplug, pick up the day’s mail, and address myself to friends. To Paul Minnie Avenue in Santa Cruz, I say “Dear Adrienne …” I average five thousand letters and postcards every year. Once when the mailman was late I bit his leg.

There are days, there are days.

The best day begins with waking early—I check the clock: damn!, it’s only 3:00 A.M.—because I want so much to get out of bed and start working. Usually something particular beckons so joyously—like a poem that I have good hope for, that seems to go well. Will it look as happy today as it looked yesterday? I roll over to wait, to take a nap at 3:00 A.M., because getting up at three will wreck the day. I close my eyes and doze, waking to check the clock every twenty-seven minutes. By four-thirty I can wait no longer. I leap out of bed, feed the cat, let the dog out, start the coffee which is timed for five but can be persuaded of an early start, dress, drive two miles for the Globe, carry a cup of coffee to Jane, read the paper while I eat a blueberry bagel, then finish my breakfast with skim milk, an apple, and a small peanut butter sandwich. I wake as I eat, drink, and read the paper. As I approach the end of the Globe, saving the sports section until last, I feel work-excitement building, joy-pressure mounting—until I need resist it no more but sit at the desk and open the folder that holds the day’s beginning, its desire and its hope.