The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

I NEVER MET Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight in Portland, Oregon, her home for many years. And yet we became good friends during the last two months of her life, entirely by way of e-mail. I inaugurated the correspondence on November 21, 2017, and she replied on November 24. After that we exchanged letters sixteen times, until her final letter of January 16, 2018, which concluded: One of the things I like least about being very old is the unreliability of my energy. Up one day, down the next, bleh! Working at poetry or a story is, always has been, the job I want to be doing, the work that keeps me steady and content. But too often there just isn't the wherewithal. I suspect your work is central to your wellbeing in much this way, and hope you aren't suffering such periods of enforced idleness.

I value our friendship. Ursula