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Now, believe it or not, the dog is cured. If you look at him a certain way you still sometimes notice his right eye drifting a little, but despite a small white mark like a scar on its surface, we know he can see through it. For a few days he kept it more and more tightly shut, then he began to open it, though all you could see of the eye itself was bloodshot and crooked. For several days after that, the dog was the spitting image of Sartre: his whole right eye was visible and no longer bloodshot, but it had a tendency to roll in unexpected directions. Now the dog is almost entirely himself again, fit and full of self-confidence.

I, on the other hand, have been tossing and turning the past few nights with some highly erotic dreams that leave me exhausted. My almost constant eczema and liver trouble aren’t helping, either. I’ve come to believe—and it’s frustrating to be stuck in such a superstitious line of thinking—that these dreams reveal a kind of curse. Erotic dreams themselves don’t bother me (in fact, I love them), but what definitely does bother me is some of the women chosen to feature in them with me. I don’t want to go into detail, but I was struck by how in the first dream, with a contemptible and unpleasant woman, I orgasmed fully—although in my physical reality this wasn’t matched by an actual release of semen—and the following night another similar woman took part in what wasn’t exactly an erotic dream, but a recurring erotic fantasy. I was in a semiconscious state, a kind of hypnotic trance. The scene was repeated a few times, and I kept drifting in and out of consciousness, but it was as if I was awake the whole time and yet unable to escape from the fantasy. And when I woke up the next day, I felt exhausted and lethargic again. Last night, which was the third night, I don’t remember dreaming about anything in particular, but I still didn’t sleep well. Today I have the same old tune in my head, and it’s pushed out the discourse in all its forms.

Meanwhile, in my waking hours, the countdown to moving day is picking up speed. The workers are finishing off the last urgent, essential jobs in the new house (after which there’ll be more jobs, and more still, for a very long time), and the thought of putting things in boxes, emptying out the furniture, and then distributing our furniture and things throughout the new house in a completely different arrangement is quite overwhelming. And in the middle of all this, we have the “holidays.”

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