Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, January 1, 1964

The snow started about noon — a heavy fall all afternoon and into early evening. It came from the northeast at a slight slant — a hypnotic, beautiful sight.

We spent the day in a leisurely fashion — I made a sporadic attempt to catalogue my works of the last ten years, but soon tired of it, and concluded it wasn’t so terribly important after all.

Watched the Tournament of the Roses with a certain disinterested detachment — too lazy to make up our minds to stop looking — in fact Bertha slept through much of it. I vaguely remember reading somewhere, the comment of some commentator on forced originality.

In effect, the writer said that, in spectacles of this sort, or in any form of artistic expression, the effort to be different, ended up with the results being even more commonplace — Thus it was with the parade — the most simple unaffected floats turned out to be the most significant, [an] original, while the endless repetition of the bizarre and elaborate grow more & more boring.

End of day music.

“Pictures at an exhibition” — which never grows common or stale. The record includes also his “Prelude to Khovanshchina and Persian Dances from the same opera.

Then — Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto (Milstein)

The air is very clear, but the moon and stars are hidden by a solid cloud mass.

Charles E. Burchfield, January 1, 1964