That’s how I should have awoken all those days: in calm surrender to bed-warm sensuality. I am thinking about the girl from last night: for a few hours I loved her. I still feel her perfume on my skin. It is taut from dried fluids on the inside of my thighs and under my pubic hair. I gratefully experience the feeling of having done my proper duty as a man—this steels you for future and past defeats. You won’t be getting anything out of me today, friend Schwab. My mind is as blank as a Gelderland windowpane. Not a particle of ambition, not a speck of guilt:

nor do I care about the insanity of my existence: locked up in a shabby hotel room, concealed from any kind of creditor, holed up within myself, denying true reality, living crazily in invented realities: a woeful demiurge, cobbling his world together out of paper and ink, paper and printer’s ink, an onanist of creation pleasure—yes, a self-satisfier, devoted to the pleasure of words—

I do not care:

I am walking a tightrope. I am ice-skating across the rope: start—sweeping out of the curve—leap—pirouette—into the next curve . . .

My Doomsday is remote today:

Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,

si bleu, si calme!

Un arbre, par-dessus le toit,

berce sa palme . . .

(incidentally, it might really exist somewhere, cet arbre par-dessus le toit—otherwise, where would the linden leaves come from? . . .)

I am in Paris. Are you listening, Schwab? I am in Paris—which you loved so much, “as if it were life itself”

Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là,

simple et tranquille.

Cette paisible rumeur là

vient de la ville—

(and you plunge into the paisible rumeur—I yank you back—a cabby’s head emerges from a taxi and yells: “Dis donc—le trottoir: c’est seulement pour les putains?”—do you remember?) It was by the Madeleine, where you picked up that girl—only it wasn’t bright out: la ville lumière was drowned in fog—the bright, lovely underworld . . .

and whatever you have to say: my soul will be forgiven

God spoke a gentle flame to his heart: oh, Man!

I know today will be a good day. I am as God originally meant me to be: a breathing creature that does not regard its existence as a curse: I lie here and feel MYSELF in the creaturely bliss of existence. I am still aglow with the images of my dream, images that are signs for other meanings: Aunt Selma’s smile means woman:

woman’s flesh, woman’s fullness, woman’s warm skin, in which the spherical triangle of pubic hair is sharply inserted in pure contour: powerfully streaming from the base to the vertex, into the closure of the thighs, insular and mystical like the grove around a grotto temple—

here I am SELF-towered:

violently a black horse rears: the hyacinth curls of the maid grab at the ardor of his purple nostrils . . .

I look for the face of a girl and do not find it in me. It is often quite close, but when I think I’m about to recognize it, it dissolves. I am so awash in lazy self-feeling that nothing in me has distinct contours.