And though I knew that the lost note could scarcely contain anything more essential, I now missed it with an impatience that drove me to despair. But that meant again that I was thinking of my book, as if I did want to finish writing it after all. It was still alive within me, then. I was alive. In spite of Schwab. In spite of Brodny, whom I had seen, hated, offended, and boorishly left before I encountered the girl at the Madeleine. I was intent on writing my book in spite of him. In spite of my murder. I wanted to live on in my book . . . And I hadn’t yet destroyed everything connected to it, there was still a pile of beginnings, outlines, notes—except for the one.

•

Let’s keep one thing in mind: I had only just awoken. I thought, saw, felt all this in the moment of awakening itself: it was my awakening; it coincided with the signals: vanishing dream—hotel room—Paris—now—here—today—I—my—SELF—

my consciousness was still rubbing its eyes at all this; it was still surprised at, and almost caught unawares by, the things it had to register: it was not fully operative; in pajamas, so to speak, and not yet in pants. Its hair was still disheveled, and it was still chewing its emotive breakfast bread: the foster mother in the flower cup, the fear on the building ledge, the plunge and the salvational gesture of waving from far below, the erotic tidings contained within . . .

behind these things, however, everything else was already seized and stowed, waiting to be processed: a fermenting gruel of images, perceptions, thoughts, associations, emotions, reflexes; the tremendous mass of surging abstractions that a brain must cope with to set a man’s day into motion—a writing man, who feeds it with himself.

The accursed nut kernel–shaped beast under my scalp was already roaring to be fed again. It was already raging in its shell again, this disgusting, gluttonous heap of soft, pale, skin-covered, inwardly twisted, layered pudding mass marbled with bloody veins and arteries. It plopped down heavily again upon my existential creature comfort, squeezing the bliss of vegetation, a bliss as warm as cow’s milk. It was already eating again into my divine filiality, that fat caterpillar, eating me off the Tree of Life . . .

And I rebelled against it, offered my animalish body against it: my proud morning glory: my SELF-towered SELF: the warmth of my limbs under the blanket, which I had pulled up all the way to the tip of my nose, my dear skin smell, the resilience of my sinews, the solidity of my muscles, the sweetness of my saliva, the vital sustenance of my breath. I mobilized my gonads, which were quite active anyhow: I reviewed the gamut of last night’s erotic images and sensations, of other nights of love, untold nights of love, real or dreamed—all this to withdraw my brain’s food: me. To save myself from myself, carry me into a different greedy center of my life and being, abstracted from myself into the throbbing, swelling, tensing, urging of a stiffening member—