It was a muggy evening. The window was open, letting in a late February heavy air. Below my windows, a few groups of students or professors and their wives went by; their footsteps coming up to me with a curious intensity, undoubtedly carried, I thought, by the humidity. Someone went to the garbage cans and opened one. The lid as it was slammed down on the ground sounded so loud to me that I might have been standing beside it. It seemed as if the contents of my own mind were clattering.

If I remember properly, I got goose pimples. At the same time, however, I was typing the dream class sequence and my identification with the character, Will, grew quite insidiously. I was never aware of any … transition of consciousness, for example, yet by the middle of that chapter, in my mind at least, I was almost speaking Will’s lines. I was speaking for him or he was speaking for me; it’s impossible for me to express this clearly.

Nothing in the manuscript said so, but I was somehow certain that Will’s threat to bow out of the course was actually a threat of suicide. Yet the main character, Oversoul Seven, hardly seemed concerned, so why should I be?

Another connection hit me when Will saw Cyprus as the feminine principle—for when he did, I saw my ex-wife, Sarah, in my mind’s eye, almost as clearly as I’ve ever seen her, physically. It came to me that I’d refused Sarah a child—as I mentioned earlier, she’s pregnant now by another man—because I saw no reason to bring another vulnerable human being into such a chaotic existence. And if I’m right about Will, then he sees no reason to continue his own life. Perhaps I am making too much of all of this, and I do note with some humor that Will was at least rational in his dismissal of life as meaningful, feeling no idiotic compulsion to search for any gods or divine varieties.