March 20

Fourth consecutive day of exercises. Although I’m sitting in the midst of the maddening buzz from the machines next door, I’m trying to follow the guidance Alicia gave me when I woke up. Strangely enough, this guidance is based on my own words, written as part of yesterday’s exercises, which she read before going to sleep, or maybe once she was already dozing off. I’d said I wasn’t responding to problems in the right way and that I needed to change that. Alicia said the same thing to me this morning, and added a few practical suggestions of her own. She must not have remembered what she read of my exercises last night.

I have good intentions, but the problem of the buzzing, which aggravates or multiplies the suffering already caused by all the other post-move problems, such as the heat, the lack of defense against the heat, and the lack of space, gets more intolerable by the day. At this moment, the buzzing has reached an astounding intensity; it’s even competing with the noise from the street. And it’s right in the middle of where I’m sitting to work. It’s filling the space, getting louder and louder, and there’s no point closing the doors and windows: now I can feel it in the form of vibrations in the soles of my feet, which are resting—encased in their slippers—on the wooden floor. It’s like an infuriating vibromassage. My good intentions aren’t going to be enough. I’m desperate to get out of here; I’m writing as fast as I can in order to finish the page at once and make a run for it. HELP.

March 21

Fifth consecutive day of exercises. The good news is, they seem to have become a habit by now. Of course, they’re still a long way from calligraphical exercises carried out with concentration and diligence, but we mustn’t expect too much. (Today I read a tremendous bit of Rilke, along the lines of: “Reality is something distant, coming infinitely slowly to those who are patient.”) (Let us be patient, then, and wait for that distant thing to come.)

(But few things conspire more against patience, and therefore against reality, than this constant buzzing that won’t let me sleep, think, or pay attention to anything else. And then there’s the interminably unsettled weather, heavy, humid, and with low air pressure. A storm’s been brewing for days now, but it won’t make up its mind to start, which sets the nerves on edge and makes it hard to get anything done. We’ve had the occasional patch of begrudging, monotonous drizzle over the past few days, but what we really need is a violent explosion of lightning, thunder, and wind, an elemental fury to release all the static electricity building up in the earth, people, and things.)