The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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HYDE PARK, N.Y., Monday—I left home yesterday for a good part of the day, but I am really getting settled down sufficiently so that I feel it is a matter of some moment to decide that I will move to any other spot. Some one once told me they did not believe that I could ever stay quiet for any length of time, but it was some one who knew very little about my early youth and the terrible effect that habits acquired in early youth have on one forever after!

For years I moved just twice a year—once in the spring to the country and once in the autumn back to town. Strange though it may seem, I could slip back into that ancient habit with the greatest of ease. In fact I have to guard against the feeling which comes to us all I imagine as we get older, that to move from place to place is really a great effort!

The joys of solitude, if tempered with occasional contact with agreeable people, will never have to be proved to me. Last evening we were reading aloud David Grayson's "Adventures in Solitude," and I must say I enjoy his style very much indeed. His experience that poetry will stay in your mind while prose will slip out of it leaving only a kind of general aroma of what you have read, is fairly universal. I have, however, found much entertainment at times in taking characters in different books and letting them work themselves out in different ways. It makes an entirely different pattern, and very often is far more satisfactory, for I have known so many literary characters that did not come up at all in the story to the people which I thought their qualities would plainly force them to be.

There is one verse that Mr. Grayson quotes that I wish we could all remember when we feel a little down in the mouth:

Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear! Oh clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

There is a swing in that verse and a determination to live which should lift anyone out of the blues!

From nine o'clock on I sat at my desk and worked till midnight, and the gentle rain came down softly all through the night. At seven this morning while the sky was gray it was not raining, and I went to exercise my horse, Dot. The woods were too wet for riding, but we rode around the big field where we school the horses.

Five times we went first one way and then the other and then Dot decided that her usual morning exercise was over. We had a difference of opinion as to whether she would return to the stable or not. Being well trained and very gentle, she agreed to do as I wished, but each time we came around she tried again to go home, feeling that anything as uninteresting as trotting and cantering around the field should not be prolonged beyond the point of the necessary amount of exercise!

E.R.


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Geographic
  • Hyde Park (Dutchess County, N.Y., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, July 13, 1937

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

  • Brick, Christopher (Editor)
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  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project

Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

TEI-P5 edition published on April 28, 2017.

XML master last modified on June 9, 2017.

HTML version generated and published on May 3, 2022.

Transcription created from a photocopy of a draft version of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. My Day column draft dated July 12, 1937, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 12 July 1937, AERP, FDRL