Only The Impediments

"Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key -- as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away." - Saul Bellow.
Bellow wrote that in a letter to Cynthia Ozick. I read it the other night and keep rereading it because it's such a beautiful sentence. He writes a lot of apologies for not writing in his letters. For me the beauty of the way he writes about not writing erases what ever lack of writing might have been. And since writing about not writing is my most common theme these days it resonated.
I've been in a wretched mood. I feel like I'm underwater surfacing long enough to catch a breath and then submerging again.
There's no one reason why I'm so cranky and there's a surprising array of things that pull me out of the funk: little bits from the reading I'm doing, catching up on Glee, finding more fresh peas when I shop, the way the light hits the water when I swim. And then the dive.
R & N are coming for a visit, which will cheer me up. In an embarrassingly frequent reflex I seem to have been even more grouchy not as a result but almost as if I'm purging.
Bellow was writing apologies for a lack of correspondence, of which I am also guilty. He, however, was pouring out fiction at the time. I'm -- well -- dusting.