Gone to Cold Lake

Welcome to my Autumn 2011 blog, "Cold Lake." Here, I will jot ideas, practice sentences, copy out favorite passages, and record my experiences as a teacher at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. To begin, I want to copy out some thoughts from writer Phillip Roth. This is the way I want to be in the coming months:

"I have to tell you that I don't believe in death, I don't experience the time as limited. I know it is, but I don't feel it," Roth said. "I could live three hours or I could live thirty years, I don't know. Time doesn't prey upon my mind. It should, but it doesn't. I don't know yet what this will alll add up to, and it no longer matters because there's no stopping. And this stuff is not going to matter anyway, as we know. So there's no sense even contemplating it, you know? All you want to do is the obvious. Just get it right and the rest is the human comedy: the evaluations, the lists, the crappy articles, the insults, the praise.

"I want only to respond to my work. I don't want to respond to all that stuff. It's not important. It was, and it is for others at a certain time, but it can't be important anymore.

"If I'm healthy and strong and writing every day, who cares? Whatever problem is raised for me by what I'm writing, I think, Don't worry about it, all it takes is time. That's all it takes. I don't worry anymore that I don't have what it takes to solve the problem. There are no interruptions, and I've got all the time in the world. Time is on my side."

-- David Remnick, Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker