"For a long time, Roth kept two small signs near his desk. One read, 'Stay Put,' the other, 'No Optional Striving.'"

"Optional striving appears to be a category that includes everything save writing, exercise, sleep, and solitude.... 'That act of passionate and minute memory is what binds your days together—days, weeks, months—and living with that is my greatest pleasure. I think for any novelist it has to be the greatest pleasure, that’s why you’re doing it—to make the daily connections. I do it by living a very austere life. I don’t experience it as being austere in any negative sense, but you have to be a bit like a soldier with a barracks life, or whatever you want to call it. That is to say, I rule everything else out of my life. I didn’t always, but I do now.... 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.... 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 all add up to, and it no longer matters, because there’s no stopping.'"

From a 2000 article in The New Yorker, "Into the Clear/Philip Roth puts turbulence in its place." 

I'm reading that because the recent talk of the new — and out of print! — biography of Roth led me to read his novel "The Human Stain," which came out in 2000, so I was reading contemporaneous articles about that. 

I chose that quote for blogging because it's about heroic isolation and dedication to writing — writing and staying alive. Here's a passage that I found in "The Human Stain" that goes into the same subject:

Abnegation of society, abstention from distraction, a self-imposed separation from every last professional yearning and social delusion and cultural poison and alluring intimacy, a rigorous reclusion such as that practiced by religious devouts who immure themselves in caves or cells or isolated forest huts, is maintained on stuff more obdurate than I am made of. I had lasted alone just five years—five years of reading and writing a few miles up Madamaska Mountain in a pleasant two-room cabin situated between a small pond at the back of my place and, through the scrub across the dirt road, a ten-acre marsh where the migrating Canada geese take shelter each evening and a patient blue heron does its solitary angling all summer long. The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one’s own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance in (Hawthorne again) “the communications of a solitary mind with itself.” The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.

I put 2 things in boldface to connect them for the purpose of contemplating whether they are the same thing.

5:22 a.m.

That's today, the 9th of the 10 days with the earliest sunrise time, 5:17.

I was there at 5:17, but the sun had not yet broken over the shoreline.



I don't have a view of the horizon. The first direct bit of sun became visible at 5:20:



You see why I picked 5:22 as the best. It wasn't because I was 5 minutes "late." I wasn't late! Were you?

"The trouble with drinking is sipping. Give us water only because we'll drain that quickly."

"The same principle will be applied to all aspects of life. Anything you might savor contemplatively will be withdrawn. You will have periodic gulps, and in between, nothing."

I wrote, at Facebook, responding to a post by my son John, which quoted a CNN article: "Many airlines are limiting drink options to water only. As face masks must be kept on other than when passengers are eating and drinking, it's a way of ensuring passengers are lingering over their refreshments for no longer than necessary."

Day 1 of the 10 days of the 5:17 sunrise — the earliest sunrise time of the year.

It looked as though it was going to be an overcast sunrise, with, at best, some bumpily textured clouds — a Type #2 sunrise. But as I reached my vantage point — 0.7 miles into my run — I saw I had "The Broiler" — Type #7!

I don't think I've ever reached my vantage point in time for one of these broilers. They tend to disappear by the sunrise time, so I catch them from my car window or the parking lot, or I make a quick stop and see them at my secondary vantage point. But today, I didn't know it was happening, because the sun is positioned so far north right now that I don't get an advance look as I'm doing the run. And then I caught the view at 5:16:



I presume it was broiling even more hotly a minute or 2 or 3 before that point, because it was fading fast. Here's how it looked a minute later, at 5:17, the "actual" sunrise time:



And one minute after that, at 5:18, it had calmed down into this:



A minute later it had descended into the Type #2 format that was all I had expected. The lesson is: If you want to catch The Broiler, get to your vantage point 5 minutes before the actual sunrise — even if it's the earliest sunrise of the year.