A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. -- the opening line of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, spoken by the narrator, Maurice Bendrix

Nelson Lodge, the Kirkridge building that is the site for Light to Read By, is at the highest point on the property, an elevation of some 1800 feet. Just across the road is an entrance to the Appalachian Trail. The view to the south out over the mountain was utterly obscured this morning by fog. I felt as if I sat suspended in space, part of no world. The near view, however, was very like the one I have at home, a snowy path through bare trees. I was up early enough to have quiet time alone, the C&C (Coffee and Contemplation) that is so necessary for me.

Last night we addressed the shorter novel, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. I can't say that I liked it. I found the narrator, novelist Maurice Bendrix, too self-absorbed, too self-conscious about his tragic circumstance. He spent most of the book sighing dramatically over the fact that his married lover had broken off the relationship in favor of another paramour. I had very little patience with him, and felt often that I wanted to say, Get over yourself Maurice! Get a life and move on! Had I read the book when I was twenty-five (a passionate victim sighing over her own broken romance, although not with a married lover), I probably would have liked it more.

This morning we looked at Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, as huge as the Greene work is miniature. It covers the lives over some thirty years of the wife and four daughters of a driven, fanatic missionary who sends himself (and consequently the family) on an ill-advised crusade into what begins as the Belgian Congo but becomes, over the course of the book, Zaire. In a sense, its scope is not unlike the book I claim to be writing -- a very personal story of growth and change, love and loss, told against the backdrop of an important historical event.

Kirkridge is dedicated to the cause of peace and justice, so many of the people who come to the programs here are activists of one sort or another. Many are also clergy. It was hard, given the present world situation and the subject of the novel, to avoid discussion of U.S. intervention into the governmental affairs of other people, but precisely because so many participants seem to be gentle people of like mind, the discussions were not rancorous. Kirkridge's motto is Picket and Pray. I used to picket. Now I only pray.

Saturday afternoon of this event is always left unscheduled. I made the required trip to the center's bookstore where I bought only one thing, a slim collection by R S. Thomas, the Welsh poet on the weekend's agenda whose work is difficult to come by. And then I took a nap.

Late in the afternoon we assembled to talk about four of the short stories, and then adjourned to Charles Rice's home, down the mountain a bit from Kirkridge. He lives in a Pennsylvania German-style farmhouse on a property that has a pond and a restored barn that he uses as a guest house. We gathered in the barn for "quiet time," a Kirkridge tradition -- wine and cheese and classical music enjoyed in silence.

After dinner we saw Iris, the movie version of Elegy for Iris, the book English novelist Iris Murdoch's husband John Bayley wrote about her final years, when Alzheimer's overtook her. Afterward, on my way through the dining room to the sleeping area, I noticed that the weather had changed. The fog was gone, and the lights of the towns of New Jersey that lie just across the Delaware River sparkled. 

I am by nature possessed of a poet's perceptions. I can see meaning and metaphor in the most oridinary things.I came here in part to mark the beginning of six months of hard, persistent work on the craft of fiction. The sight of another world across an unseen river seemed to signal that that period has indeed begun.