I am sitting near Perth Amboy, N.J. on the port quarter of the scow whose starboard side is swinging just free of one of the Colonial docks. The water is dung-coloured and slides away smoothly, horizontally before the eye. A tanker. Low brown and green countryside, low bridges. 

The village is celebrating I don’t know how many years of destruction. The band goes blaring by below my apartment. Among the crowd of youngsters following it I recognize someone who was tried about three weeks ago; he has a patch over his right eye and his cheek is pocked with barely healed scabs. 

Dawn in a forest. Pale light in the sky. Woods indistinct. Rustling of leaves, sound of soft, wooden whistles. On a sort of bluff or ledge of stone elevated above the rest there is seen a cloud of smoke drifting up into the sky or trees. 

That day I could not work because the sky was grey. The day before I had not worked because the sky was blue. I left the Public Library, where I was working at my history of the French Revolution (a work I could no longer do at home because the view from my apartment made me nervous), and decided to take a short walk on Fifth Avenue, uptown of course, because to walk downtown would have been fatal to my work.

In the photograph, my mouth is slightly open. I am talking to the man sitting next to me. The man is the writer, Alberto Moravia. Next to him, there is a woman. She is smiling at the camera, I can’t think of her

There is a cairn of shames, towered and teetering on his chest, that the slightest movement could lethally topple.

Goody Yates was a mess. He shambled along the side of the road, slump-shouldered and bleeding from the mouth, his head stuffed with cotton, pain and delirium duking it out in the pit of his mind. 

Once, I was asked to be on the organizing committee for the Buenos Aires Book Fair and to coordinate a roundtable discussion among writers.

I’m the one who started it. I was depressed as hell and wanted to share my bad news. “Has anyone read Candide?” I said.

Imogene pressed her face against the window, making a lozenge of cold wetness on her left cheek. It was raining. Great gray streamers hung from the sky, in mourning for an angel. Today was the day