And boring young Professor Rick L. Tucker would be there at breakfast! At the memory of him I started up in bed, then collapsed again with a groan. It was a small blessing to count, that he had no wife with him, or I should probably have made a pass at her or at the very least been suggestive. And we should drink again. No. I should drink again, out of opportunity and boredom, thus making a nonsense of the high moral stand, the teetotalism that had seemed so irrefrangible no longer ago than last Monday.

There was another thing. It was a black hole in my memory of the previous night, where the long summer evening had turned into night. It was not a large black hole—merely a blotch between the after-dinner drinking and—yes, now it was smaller, the black hole I mean, because on its very brink I remembered getting up yet another bottle, opening it, despite their protests and—doing what? I examined my throat, my mouth, my head, my stomach. It was impossible to believe that I had really made any significant inroads into that (fifth?) bottle. Otherwise my head would be . . . and my stomach would be . . . and the black hole would be . . .

It was at that very moment—and if I bothered to leaf through that pile of journals out there that I am going to burn, I could tell you the hour as well as the date—that I conceived a thought. The point where drinking can be defined as alcoholism is precisely where the black hole is recognized as part of it. I remember thinking, in the terrible clarity of early morning, that the symptoms also implied that the disease was incurable. For it was part of the running of the mind, the universal process. I sat up in bed, but slowly. The window was aglimmer. I moved into another emotional gear, another symptom, perhaps, a feeling of dry, hard factuality that probed my situation from every side, an army of unutterable law which in time might produce unthinkable horrors, as in all accounts of drug addiction. It was not impossible to envisage this very dryness and bleakness as a monster itself that was not yet visible—and would not, I thought with a spurt of real desperation, would not ever be visible if I could help it! I would fight the black hole, fight it on the beaches, in pubs and restaurants, clubs, bars, in travel, in the house, in the very damned delectable bottles themselves, hoping at last to find some pleasure without payment or, alternatively, a pleasure taken in calm, sober daylight rather than this stare so dry and hard—I was frightened, I remember, in a deep, hard way, an appalled way. No, no, I protested to the glimmering window, it can’t be as bad as that! But the words of the wise man returned upon me. Remember that everything that can happen to a man can happen to you!