October 16

Yesterday I managed only three and a half lines of exercises, and then I was interrupted and had to stop. It happened just as I was beginning to write about interruptions, or rather, about my desperate need for some continuity in my work, some order and discipline, because these mindless, scattered days aren’t doing me any good. They overwhelm me, making me forget who I am and sucking the meaning out of existence.

It’s not that I define myself by my work, and nor am I one of those people who can’t live without something to do or even who have the capacity to get bored. No, when I talk about continuity in my work, I might just as well be talking about continuity in my free time. What matters is the continuity itself, and the psychological danger comes from fragmentation—at least, it does in my case, and in this phase of my life.

It’s not interruptions or changes in activity that upset things, but rather sudden interruptions and forced changes when I haven’t had the chance to complete a psychological process, whether in my work or in my leisure activities.

The situation is made worse by the accumulation of things to do, which, thanks to all the interruptions, I never get around to. Days, weeks, and months can go by like this; unfinished tasks mount up and weigh on me, and it seems impossible to get through them all—unless, as with my monthly crossword obligations, they become urgent. I live from one urgency to the next.

October 17

I’ve realized that the system of interruptions governing this house derives from the fact that Alicia is a fractal being (see Mandelbrot) with a fractal pattern of behavior. And since she decides what goes on in this family, everything that goes on is fractal and can develop only in a fractal way, like a snowflake.

Psychological fractility must surely correspond to some psychological fracture. I don’t think these phenomena have been studied in enough detail. For now, I could formulate a kind of law to describe the general behavior of this family I find myself in: “Any movement toward a goal will immediately be diverted toward another goal, and so on, and the movement toward the original goal may or may not ever be resumed.”

October 25

Today I failed in my grand plans to start living more healthily, with less time spent on things like reading and using the computer, precisely because of an irresistible urge to use the computer. There’s always some idea I want to try out, or some mystery that needs solving once and for all. I think the computer is taking the place of my Unconscious as a field of investigation. I went as far as I could with my investigations into my Unconscious, and the by-product of those investigations is the literature I’ve written (although literature was also a tool I used in those investigations, in some cases at least).