Lipsett diaries

L. sees very clearly that he’s through with his work, with love and religion. L. was in no way senile [but has] something frozen about him [and is] filled up to his teeth with bitterness.Habit, the great deadener has proven more tenacious than inspiration. His present concerns revolve around the gratification of those very bodily appetites that, earlier, he had resolved should be out of his life. Eating bananas and drinking have become a daily routine. Of the physical activities that he once considered excesses only sex has come to play a reduced part in his lonely existence in the form of periodic visits from the woman who visits him from time to time, whom he describes as a “bony old ghost of a whore… Could have been happy with her, up there on the North….