I had arrived at the decision to do some poking around my own background only after exhausting the other possibilities. The most rational explanation of recent events – that I had simply retained a large body of knowledge and information about Thomas Hardy without consciously remembering that I had ever possessed it – was unsatisfactory to me for the following reasons: it didn’t account for our shared anniversaries, for my bad dreams, for what I now wanted to do and have done to Sharon every night, and for my absolute conviction that I would never, under any circumstances or for any reason, have bothered to acquire a large body of knowledge and information about Thomas Hardy. I was similarly unimpressed by the usual psychoanalytical understanding of regression, namely that subjects invented new personalities out of repressed and largely unfulfilled desires. I wasn’t going to have it that any desire to be this particular personality had ever been in me to repress. If I’d acted out the life of Attila the Hun or Errol Flynn or Henri Beyle otherwise known as Stendhal it might have been different. And as for reincarnation, as understood, say, in the Buddhist doctrine of Karma (I hadn’t yet had time to digest gilgul), I can only state that I have always possessed a super-Western sense of individual goal and achievement and that any idea of life as an endless teeming continuity fills me with abhorrence. I roll my own rock up the mountain, and if that means I wake up desolate with futility each morning to find it has rolled the whole way back again while I slept, well, there are at least the compensating joys of arrogance and scorn to look forward to when I once more put my shoulder to the boulder. Go not guru-wards remains a general principle with me to this day, much to the dismay of those woolly-hatted bean-eaters I have mentioned, who meet and smile at me and play in Ceilidh bands in Camilla’s old haunts and who, it often seems to me, have made the trek to this westernmost extremity of the country solely in order that they might then turn and face the East. No, it wasn’t possible for me to accept that the unresolved cravings of another life were striving for expression through me. There was a modesty in this, for what, to look at it from the other point of view, could Thomas Hardy hope to resolve in the person of Barney Fugleman? Did he want to be a Jew? Did he want a Jewish wife? Or did he just want to make trouble? If that was the case then he was a dybbuk not a reincarnation, only I didn’t believe in dybbuks either.