The Cheerful Skies - Book 1

The Cheerful Skies – Book 1, details the events of eighty-seventh year, 2019, when I left Paris, and settled in Sarasota, Florida. This book, #5 in a series I call The Gates of Hell, follows the first four, The Descent, and The Task, Parts 1, 2, and 3, which covered my years after college in 1954.

The series and book titles derive from The Aeneid:

The Gates of Hell stand open night and day;
Smooth The Descent, and easy is the way;
But to return, and view The Cheerful Skies,
In this The Task and mighty labor lies.
Virgil, trans. Dryden

I hope my readers appreciate how I've recreated the joys and accomplishments of these sixty-five years. However, a dark thread runs through them. Only dimly aware of it, a relentless psychological disorder, a powerful neurosis, gripped me in it jaws.

And the Leader, who beheld me so attent,
Exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are;
Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns."
Dante, trans. Longfellow

When I sought help, many professionals refused to take me on. I finally entered psychoanalytic therapy in New York City. Slowly the treatment began to take effect, and you may see the results for yourself in The Cheerful Skies – Book 1.

My writing style? Maybe a combination of a rambling memoire and a diary, with discourses.

But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Robert Lowell