VCCA still

What a horrid idea, leaving here next week -- indeed, I see why the sign on the way out says "to the real world," because this is anyone's idea of a sort of utopian community, without the nuttiness there can be.I am reading Susan Cheever's terrific and funny and brilliantly-styled American Bloomsbury, and delighting in the nuttiness of the Concord folk back there, in the times of Emerson and Margaret Fuller, Thoreau and Ellen Sewall, Melville and his impassioned everythingness. I love, absolutely LOVE reading about Bronson Alcott (his chosen name, better, to be sure than Amos whatever it was), and his setting up of Fruitland, where he didn't want to take
1) milk from the cows
2) eggs from the chickens
3) wool from the lambs
so they lived on
a) water
b) bread
c) fruit

but then,  as someone said to me at lunch (witty group here), what if the trees  started withholding their fruit, and the wheat, etc? anyway, they moved back to Concord.
This book is full of people moving back to Concord and moving away and moving back, especially Hawthorne... and of the Margaret Fuller catastrophe... drowning all that brilliance and that dark hair...

so all day you get to do whatever you do in your studio, which also has a bed (what?) so you can take naps or think or whatever you usually do stretched out, and then you can take talks, and have some leftover something for lunch  and meet for supper and that is about it. Nice it.