Sometimes, the flame is steadier. For a happy span of time I work a few hours every day with a clear mind. I don’t have to strain my mind, there’s nothing for me to invent. There’s material galore, in heaps, in piles of paper covered with writing. I link up fragments, fill out joints, smooth over bumps. The sober craft of working and reworking makes me feel my growing abilities and capabilities. I am pumped so full of faith and confidence that I soon burden myself with other work—work that brings in cash. I then spend the money right and left: it is a light currency and I’m on top. I feel I can do the impossible, I dare to make all sorts of ambitious plans, I accept obligations I cannot honor—and I soon find myself so entangled in promises and agreements, contracts, coercions, warnings, dunnings, final notices, that I have to apply all my time and energy somehow to complete things I have hastily begun, finally to tackle things that are long overdue, further to delay things I have frivolously promised . . .

most of these matters drag on forever; I dare not even think about my book. And the weeks wear on, the months, the years . . .

There are also periods when I am incapable of anything. I brood obtusely and stupidly over empty pages. I am unable to form a sentence out of a subject, verb, object. Nothing comes to me. Even my worst spirits abandon me: my impudence, my wittiness. Doubt in myself, in what I have to say and in my ability to express it, sucks up what little energy drove me to the desk to at least make a stab at it. Discouragement assails me, impairs my other work along with it. Even (and especially) the movie scripting, long since a cynical routine, is now impossible. I dawdle through the days, grow restless, swell with impatience, long for action, want to be among people and thus avoid them. So I leap over not only my own inhibitions but all sustainting distances as well, smash the neutrality of noncommittal relationships and make them personal: I soon find myself entangled in disagreeable friendships and useless love affairs from which I can extricate myself only in the most brutal fashion. I get lazy, I can’t get out of bed in the morning or into it at night (at least not my own). Suspicious passions break out: I collect all kinds of superfluous stuff (deluxe editions of books I won’t read, sinfully expensive objects I don’t know what to do with and soon give away). I tend to my appearance with the vain punctiliousness of an aging pederast, I shower my tailor, my shoemaker, my shirtmaker with orders, I spend a fortune on neckties, ascots, dressing gowns, slippers, soaps, toilet water, brushes, files, and I reach under every skirt I can find. I feel time flying by, and I run a race with it: no car is fast enough for me, I drive heedlessly at break-neck speed, I invent the necessity of dashing from place to place: the experience of speed both calms me and tires me, both whips me up and wipes me out, leaves me unfeeling and unthinking.