There is a sinister quality to a hot August wind as it sweeps up over the oat stubble, and moans thru the loose clapboards of an old barn. Tho heat waves are dancing over the hot dry fields, one thinks, paradoxically enough, of winter.
all of us to see “Mr. Deeds goes to Town” at the Lafayette, brought back after several years. At the first showing several years ago, I had gone twice, enjoying it as much as the second time as the first. I wondered whether I would think as much of it, after this lapse of time. But if anything the picture looms even better;
How did the nightingale its reputation for beauty? Our woodthrush is much more beautiful.
Dream: Of being in a woods, and coming upon a picture by Hopper which he had just completed...
– I discover a parrot-like tropical bird on the train, which has something wrong with it, flying along, and trying to alight on the coach in which I am riding.
Evening dinner with the Millers. We liked Mrs. M at once. She is of Finnish decent & a great admirer of Sibelius.
This is a splendid time of the day and does not occur every day. Sun three or four hours from the horizon & very bright & sparkling. The wind easy & fresh & seems inseparable from the sunlight. Leaves of Jewell-Weed become transparently yellow-green.
[After all it is the unexpected sights which please the most & remain longest in our consciousness. All unawares I suddenly came upon a colony of cardinal flowers & gazed for a moment almost without breathing. True it was my pulse quickened. What a luminous red! The eye cannot look at them & see a clear outline. They border edge of an empty stream bed whose mud-bottom is yet slimy.]
I have never observed so many colors in lightning as tonight. The general color was pink. At times some bolts took on a yellow tinge. Some were so near that they appeared a glowing blue, and again pale violet.
A yellow light fills the air—one must wonder if it finds its source in the pale sun, whose dreamy light is spread over the whole sky while the drifting mist...
Last evening an unusual cloud phenomenon- (similar to the cloud effects of that rhapsodic year of 1915, when I was continually overwhelmed by the power and beauty of the heavens)- a long narrow mass of heavy cumulus clouds extending from the west to the east, dividing the sky almost into two equal parts.