I am unable to comprehend how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

The preface and introduction by Isherwood and Auden allowed me to round up. I completed the text after discovering we had been burglarized and before going to a funeral. How's that for a Thursday in spring? I should sigh now and shut my fucking mouth. There was no catastrophe. Evidently the housebreakers harbored no literary interest. I recovered a portion of my stolen clothing (!!!) in a copse of woods across the way. Auden spends a fair amount of time parsing the concept of the heroic as it changes from Homer to Plato and onto the Christian tradition. This notebook while hardly intimate does reveal a germ of contemplation upon a heroic life in 19C Europe.

The pained aspects of the journal involve Baudelaire's need for sobriety and income. There is an ache in that almost serial sentiment. ( )