I faced the four corners, cupped the bowl of my glass like a breast, began the construction of my anecdote, and let the wine die.

Is writing to yourself a healthier insanity than talking to yourself? Would Amid say so? Gide or Pepys?

Night, joked Mallet too much; wrong. ‘Tis below you. ‘Tis bad habit. No more of it.

Or is making love to yourself, elaborately, with ritual remorse, better? worse?

Yet I should take notes. I’ve inherited a poor memory from my mum, yes, the way some inherit weak eyes, and everything goes by me as remembered—as observed—as the poop of public birds.

Very mild and warm. About 6 glow-worms shining faintly. We went up as far as the grove. When we came home the fire was out. We ate our supper in the dark, and went to bed immediately. William was disturbed in the night by the rain coming into his room, for it was a very rainy night. The ash leaves lay across the road.

There’s death in every diary. I’ve found it there the way I’ve found so many words, lying silent and forgotten like old shoes stiffening in a closet, or moving at the approach of my eye like a spider in a toolbox, as though some small piece of metal were alive. Wasn’t there a day in infancy when such a startle would have made my limbs splash open?

I pick up my dropped life in this calamitous century’s sixty-seventh year; a year windy with unreason, noisy with nonsense and meaningless milling; a year like the last, just right for a decade as mired in morality as a circus in mud, as infested with fakes as a fair. Perhaps it’s only a trampled package in the street—this life I pick up—and maybe my writing is its furtive unwrapping.

In a diary you may go to greet death in the most slovenly state of undress and disease, your language out of reach of any public reading, your own eye kind, accustomed to your own wastes and malodorous ailments, almost incapable of offense, incurably forgiving. You may write without anyone’s whining that the day was not only “mild” but “warm” as well; you can pointlessly infer that if the rain came pelting into Wm’s room, it must have been a rainy night indeed; and you can inadvertently say something beautiful containing ash leaves, and never register what you saw of the storm, or felt about love in your unbrothered bed, or say that you wept along your sleeping arm, or signify how well you grasped the sense of what you said.

So I wonder why I’ve lived so much of my life in a chair the way I wonder at the daily disappearance of my chin—without surprise—without question or answer—because loneliness is unendurable elsewhere. Here it may be sat through, if not stood. Here it may be occasionally relieved, like a crowded bowel. Here it may be handled like a laboratory mouse, so tenderly it squeaks only from the pressures of its own inner fears. And here that loneliness may be shaped the way the first dumb lump of clay was slapped to speech in the divine grip. We were late among the living, and by the time God got to us ice was already slipping from the poles as if from an imperfectly decorated cake. The stars and planets were out of sync. Uncured, the serpent was swaying on its tail like an enraptured rope. Haven’t I always maintained that our several ribs were the incriminating print of a bedeviled and embittered fist?