The moment Das repeated the question I knew my answer: Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working. I asked him what he answered, and he told me: “I said, ‘Give me two minutes and I will answer your question.’ I took two minutes while they waited. Then I told them that contentment was absorbedness.” So Gurcharan Das’s answer and mine were the same. I liked his word; a noun with a lot of verb in it. (“Absorption” sounds too much like paper towels.) With enthusiasm I agreed with him, speaking of early morning hours, concentration on the page and its words, total loss of identity, hours that pass like seconds or without any notion of time elapsing: It is always the paradox of contentment—of happiness or joy—that to remain at its pitch it must include no consciousness of itself; you are only content when you have no notion of contentment.

Yes, Gurcharan Das answered my question, sometimes he felt this absorbedness in his business, yes … but not so much as in writing fiction. His latest novel, A Fine Family, had started slowly, they all do, but then it livened itself, and his writing time (weekends; snatched hours waiting for India Air in the Delhi Airport; half an hour before dawn on a weekday) rose to the highest pitch.

“Only making love,” I said, “is anything like it.” His head bobbed in agreement; he grinned with conspiracy.

Today makes a week of Life Work. As I walk the dog, or watch spring training games from Florida while struggling to finish my income tax, I think about work and take notes. Driving I keep a little tape machine beside me. I am absorbed, in this book and in “Another Elegy.” Every day I have ideas for poem and essay, and every day make another draft of the poem and add pages of this prose to the Life Work pile. Do I fiddle too much with the poem as I approach six hundred bloody drafts? Do I repeat the same tone and feeling in all my work-anecdotes? I am swept away: I am happy; I am manic. Am I manic? Who else counts the numbers of drafts? Like Wade Boggs I know not only how many singles I have hit but also what count I had each single on, where it went, and what kind of pitch I hit. (I know even more detail about striking out with the bases loaded.) But I know none of these things while I am writing at the desk. I am utterly happy, utterly unself-conscious.

Then I remember—sagging suddenly, heavy as mud, black, and hopeless—all the times I have felt this way, writing poems especially but occasionally essays, when I have come later to realize that the words I wrote with such excitement were nothing, nothing, nothing at all, and my excitement (my certainty!) merely a function of blood chemistry. One disease of working alone—the way writers mostly work—is dependence on mood. Mood is no measure and flips from highest to lowest in a millisecond.