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A thought in the middle of the night (I’m having a miserable time falling asleep; I lie awake for hours and watch the sky turn gray):

Rub Scherping’s nose in Gertrude Stein’s “people are not interested in stories, people are interested in existence.” No more artfully dramatized sequences of events in which characters appear as “actors,” determining the flow of the story by acting and suffering. Instead, the weaving together of existences in the motionless time-space of the narrative—existence is pure present, has no chronologic development, is in the simultaneity of past, present, and future—

no thread is spun, but a static piece of fictive reality is woven; events that occur within it are subjectivized and no longer exist as something that can be generally experienced. Instead, they stand by themselves as a pattern, the pattern of the weave in each separate existence.

(The difference between Tolstoy and Joyce—with luck, Scherping may be familiar with their tables of contents.)

Centrifugal and centripetal narration—

To obtain nuances, highlights, etc., take up some things not germane to the action—

(Scherping’s almost unimaginable astonishment that I’m plagued by such thoughts even at night [and thus definitely outside office hours], as if I had a personal interest in them, and not just as a wage earner. In fact, they’re a blessed distraction from the swarming nightmares in the Brueghel landscape of insomnia [my murder!]

—thus: literature as escape even in this sense—)

SCHWAB

Biographical note:

He can barely recall his boyhood years (and his childhood, not at all). He dreamed his way through them. He gets self-conscious when asked about them, pussyfoots around the facts as if they embarrass him. The truth is, he has trouble reconstructing them. They lie befogged in the diffuse light of the daydreams woven through them. The “way it could have been” always superseded what was actually happening.