I should say that Plutarch was a first-century Greek philosopher, while Montaigne was a sixteenth-century French essayist. Montaigne is, in fact, generally considered the first essayist, or anyway the first writer in the West to have popularized the form that came to be recognized as the essay.

I just now picked up Montaigne’s Essays and read one of them at random. It was a response to something that Montaigne himself had read in a translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Montaigne was agreeing with Plutarch on a certain topic, but imagining a scenario that would’ve qualified or complicated what Plutarch had said. The topic had to do with whether it is virtue or folly for a statesman to ‘put off’ work when such work arrives, or makes itself known, while he, the statesman, is in a social setting that requires his attention, or politesse.

Here are the books that are currently piled on the table in the living room where I’ve been writing for the past couple days. Erewhon by Samuel Butler, The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima, Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway, The Devils by Fyodor Dostoevksy, The Double by José Saramago, Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac, The Ballad of Beta-2 by Samuel R. Delany, Angels by Denis Johnson, Bullet Park by John Cheever, and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. There is also among them my copy of the Holy Bible, but I feel I should list that one separately from the others, as it is Scripture.

It continued to snow through the night last night, so this morning I got dressed and went outside and shoveled. When I came back in I took off my boots and walked through the house in my socks. A. was at the desk in the room we call the office, at her computer, working. One of the cats was on the high, round-topped table next to the window in the kitchen. He’d been watching me through the window as I cleared a path from the house to the garage. The other cat was curled up on the bed in the bedroom. He opened his eyes as I took off my jeans and hung them from a hook behind the door, then closed his eyes again and rested his head on his paws.

At which point I also delete, or anyway change, the entries that precede and follow them. Because a particular thought tends to encompass a handful of entries. And any given entry tends to be connected to what came before it and what comes immediately after it.

I have now and then, in the progression of these entries, deleted some of them, after I’ve written them and have read back over them and have decided there’s something about them I don’t like.

A. is toward the back of the house, at the desk in the room we call the office, working. The cats are asleep somewhere or other. I’m experiencing one of those days when I can’t think of much of anything to write about, and when I do manage to write something I don’t like what I have written.

It’s snowing now. I can see big fat flakes drifting past the window when I part the curtain, here in the living room, where I’m sitting on the bench seat at the table, at my laptop, writing.

The Highlander is the vehicle that we keep at the house out here in Cheyenne. I don’t think I mentioned its brand name before, but only referred to it as the ‘vehicle’. The other car we own, the one that A. and I drive to and from New York, is a Subaru Crosstrek. Both of them were pre-owned when we bought them. The Highlander is older, and has many more miles on its odometer. It is a Toyota, I should say. Highlander is the name of the model, not the brand.

I noticed yesterday that the tires on the Highlander are low, so this morning I’m going to drive to a gas station and fill them with air. I don’t think they are flat, but only depleted from the persistent cold weather.

A mortal sin also requires that the deed in question involves a ‘grave’ or serious matter, and that the person consents to it with their will, or volition.

A venial sin does not injure a person’s relationship with God, the way a mortal sin does. It injures it, but not as extensively.

Of course, not everyone believes in sin, or agrees on its definition, I recognize that. And even in Catholicism, a person must be aware that they are sinning, must have knowledge of the fact, in order that the deed amounts to a sin. Or anyway that the sin be mortal, rather than venial.

One thing about being Catholic, or anyway about taking Catholicism seriously, is that you can’t deceive yourself as easily as you once might have about what is and isn’t a sin. I say this because of the Sunday obligation that is attendance at Mass.

We reached Cheyenne yesterday, in the late afternoon. I went to evening Mass shortly after we arrived, because it was Sunday yesterday and I try not to miss Mass anymore on Sundays, even if I can find a reason not to go.

Even after I did begin to publish, I never became that writer I hoped to be, and imagined myself as. Which is fine, I’ve come to terms with who I am, or where I am, I’m not sure how to say it. I’m still ambitious, but I recognize the minor key that my work seems to want to play, or the niche into which it seems to want to fit.

I was only twenty-six or twenty-seven, but I remember I’d felt old, like life was getting away from me. I had a dream of becoming a great American fiction writer, but I hadn’t published anything yet.

At both Walmart locations I’d worked nights, stocking shelves.

I’d also worked at a Walmart in the town of North Platte, in western Nebraska, just previous to my stint of employment in Iowa City. Previous to that I’d worked as a reporter for a newspaper in that same town of North Platte, though not for very long.

In Iowa City, along the highway, we stopped at a gas station across from a Walmart where I worked for a couple months back in 2004. I didn’t know we were going to stop there, in its vicinity, and when I saw it I remembered working there and what my life had been like back then and my mood became ponderous and quiet. Which is a funny thing to say, but I don’t know how else to say it. I mean only that I became thoughtful and somewhat melancholy, or nostalgic, because I was conscious of the way time had passed since then, and the direction my life had gone, or hadn’t gone, according to choices I’d made and events that had affected me. So that A., feeling the shift in vibes between us, as we drove out of the gas station, remarked on it. And I felt obliged to explain to her what I could, of what I’d been thinking.