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.

But my book still glows in me. It has burnt to ashes nearly a third of my life.

It screwed up my marriage with Christa and drove Dawn to the madhouse. It was the lie (never fully exposed, yet shining through everywhere and soon filtering into everything) that kept Gaia from trusting me (which then caused her death). It turned my son (a child with eyes like well water in which I was reflected as a star) into a bitter little bookkeeper of my unkept promises and unfulfilled assurances—hence turned me into an ever shrewder swindler, an ever craftier liar and counterfeiter. It turned my existence into a more and more threadbare as-if.

For whatever I write, it ultimately writes me. Whatever I narrate, it ultimately narrates me. In other words, it is not I who live my life, my book lives me. And what I live and how I live are determined by the success or failure of my book.