My doubts relate more to the fact that now, when I look back on that time, another completely different image occurs to me as the source of that impulse; and judging by this image, the initial impulse arose from a conversation I had with a friend. I’d told this friend about an experience of mine that had been extremely transcendental, and I’d told him how difficult it would be to turn it into a story. According to my theory, there are some extraordinary experiences that can’t be written about without becoming denatured; it’s impossible to set them down on paper. My friend insisted that if I wrote it just as I’d told it that night, I’d have a beautiful story; and that not only would I be able to write it, but that writing it was my duty.

I almost certainly won’t manage. Experience has taught me that. And yet I find myself hoping things will be different this time, because the grant is involved. I’ve already been sent the first half of the money, which will be enough to keep me until the end of the year in a reasonable life of leisure. As soon as I knew for certain I was getting the grant this year, I began more or less clearing my schedule, getting rid of some things altogether and spacing others out, so as to leave very few days each month when I have any commitments at all. You see, a life of leisure takes time to arrange. It doesn’t come about just like that, from one moment to the next, simply because you have nothing to do. At the moment my instinct is to fill every gap, devoting all my free time to stupid, pointless activities, because, almost without realising it, I have become like those people I always look down on: intensely afraid of my own selfhood, of being alone with nothing to do, of the ghosts in the basement pushing at the trapdoor, eager to poke their heads out and give me a fright.

I read the questionnaires, and while I was reading them I composed my responses in my head. The questions addressed a multitude of personal topics and referred to my life history from birth to the present day. Each one had only a limited space for the answer, and yet each one deserved a response that was almost infinitely long, or at least spanning a volume or more, and not the slim ones either. For example: your relationship and its problems. Which relationship? All of them? Wow … Please describe in five lines the problems with every relationship you’ve ever had. He might as well have set the questionnaire out as one of those multiple-choice exams. There were also questions about professional matters: how do I get on with my bosses, with my subordinates, etc. Bosses? Does anyone have a boss in this world? And subordinates? God forbid. In other words, I saw how the whole thing was shaping up: therapy for builders, office workers and executives. If you don’t fit into one of those categories, it’s because you’re mad. There must be something wrong with you if you’re a free person.

Chl is still making progress with her therapy; it’s interesting to see how she’s opening up to topics that she used to be very closed to. These days she talks easily about things that were once completely off limits, or too painful to address. She told me on the phone that today she attacked the therapist (attacked him verbally, that is). A positive development. But then she regretted it, or at least she was worried about it. She feels sorry for people too easily. She always puts herself in the other person’s place and suffers over things they probably don’t care about at all.

And just like that, it’s almost 7 a.m. I knew this would happen. The workshop. All day long, the workshop. It was satisfying; my students are excellent. But it tires me out, it tires me out and then afterwards I don’t want to go to sleep for hours and hours. At least I wasn’t messing around with games; I was working intensively on a macro – or Macro – in this very program, Word, considerably improving on what I did the other day, with the aim of putting together a master document for this diary. I also, before that, printed out everything I’d written until yesterday, which must mean I’ve made up my mind to read it. I haven’t read it yet. I’m curious. I want to know if there’s anything interesting here, anything that might be interesting to a reader other than myself. Why? It’s not that I want to pull the wool over the Guggenheim Foundation’s eyes and present them with this diary instead of the project; what’s more, the Foundation have expressly stated that they don’t want me to present them with anything. They just want to know what I’ve spent their money on when it comes to the end of the year. And what’s even more, I want to finish the project; it’s just that I haven’t yet reached that point, and I still have a long way to go, I think, before I do; but when I get there, and get there I shall, I’ll do the work quickly and well. I believe in myself. I just have to stop putting off the act of confronting and overcoming the vague anxiety, overcoming it and reaching my life of leisure; it’s all as simple as that. As simple and as painful. Dear reader: never dream of mixing your writing and your life. Or rather, do; you’ll have your fair share of suffering, but you’ll give something of yourself, which is ultimately the only thing that matters. I’m not interested in novelists who grind out their four-hundred-page doorstoppers with the help of index cards and a disciplined imagination; the only information they transmit is empty, sad, depressing. And deceitful, since it comes disguised as naturalism. Like the famous Flaubert. Pah.

Back to the difficult subject … My relapse into searching for pornography last year, I mean. I’ll need to go back to some earlier events. Towards the end of May ’98, I met Chl, and then, around the middle of July, our romantic relationship began. This made the atmosphere in the house where I was living unbearable, because the woman who at the time was my wife didn’t look kindly on this new relationship, even though by that point she and I were merely living under the same roof and our relationship had ended around two years before. Little by little a kind of war was gathering force, becoming more and more terrible, erupting into torturous everyday scenes, and in the end there was nothing for it but to move in with some friends who knew about the situation and had invited me to stay. I planned to be in that house for ten days; I didn’t leave for six months.

I’ve skimmed over what I called that ‘kind of war’ because it affects the privacy of another person, my ex-wife, with whom these days I have a very good friendship. It took me a lot of work to get to this stage, but I think it was worth it, because despite the various ways she’s incompatible with me when it comes to life as a couple, she’s a wonderful woman. I don’t want to go into my own suffering in those months, either, which was made bearable only by the magic of Chl; I’ll simply say that one fine day I realised my ex-wife was right to be hurt, and I put a stop to all our arguments and waited for time to soothe her pain and heal the wound. This realisation came to me by means of a dream, which I can’t remember very well right now.

The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve one’s desires, because one has placed one’s desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one’s hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These reflections are trite, but there they are.

[...] while I was engrossed in the task of washing the cutlery and then the plastic containers and then the plates, I made my discovery: namely that this, and nothing else, was the leisure I needed. I realised that leisure doesn’t have to mean sitting in an armchair and waiting tensely for the vague anxiety to come. That the vague anxiety will come of its own accord, when it has to, if it has to. I’d been trying to impose a particular state of mind on myself, and that’s where I was going wrong. It’s fine to sit in one armchair to rest or in another armchair to read, when you feel like it, when it’s necessary. But if you do it out of duty, in order to begin a project like the one covered by this grant, it’s not leisure. It’s not even the pursuit of leisure. Rather, the pursuit of leisure turns into work, or indeed business, and business is the very opposite of leisure. Many years ago, a friend pointed out that the word ‘business’ is actually referring to being busy, to busy-ness. Leisure, i.e. not being busy, isn’t what I thought it was – to be honest, I didn’t think much about what it was, I just went on behaving in that misguided way. What I mean is that leisure doesn’t have its own substance, it’s not an end in itself. It’s nothing: leisure is an attitude of the soul, and it can accompany any kind of activity. It’s not the contemplation of the void, let alone the void itself; you could say it’s a way of being. Sitting in an armchair doing nothing isn’t necessarily leisure, and washing the dishes can be leisure, if you have the right attitude. The right attitude, when it comes to washing the dishes, is washing the dishes as if it were the most important thing in the world. Not as if it were; it is the most important thing, like anything else I might have been doing at that moment, and it’s leisure insofar as what I’m doing leaves my mind clear and unattached, unattached to anything other than my contemplation of the thing I’m doing. And that thing shouldn’t be done for the purpose of any kind of business, because that ruins everything. I wash the dishes without wanting to be doing anything else, taking my time. And after washing the dishes I get the little yoghurt jars ready and plug in the yoghurt-maker. It’s the kind of thing I always do, only at that moment I was being leisurely about it, because my mind wasn’t on any kind of business, because I didn’t want to be doing anything else instead, because I was having fun doing what I was doing. That’s leisure, or at least it’s the leisure I need. My workshops aren’t leisure because their purpose relates to business, however enjoyable they might be and however much they move my spirit. They’re an activity with a timetable and a purpose. They’re not leisure, and they always upset my nerves. Last night, however, washing the dishes brought peace to my spirit and showed me the path to follow. And I’ll try to follow it.

I was saying, then, a while ago, almost at the beginning of this diary, that I moved into the house of some friends for ten days and stayed there for six months. During that time I tried to look for an apartment, but it wasn’t easy. I flicked through the paper that listed apartments for rent and felt terribly depressed; I couldn’t read it, I didn’t have the strength. When Chl came along I’d been living with the woman who was then my wife for ten years, and although the last few had been very, very hard and we were no longer strictly a couple, just living together, and although at first the separation felt like a relief, like being set free, I still went through a kind of prolonged mourning period. I couldn’t deal with the situation; I couldn’t set myself in motion. I had some savings in the bank and I could see them disappearing by the day; this made me panic, and the panic paralysed me even more. [...]

[...] I felt like I was suspended in mid-air, without my things, without my books, with almost nothing of my own, and I’ve always been very dependent on my habitat. My bedroom was tiny, and the bed inside it was tiny; I had to learn to sleep with my head resting on one arm, because there weren’t enough pillows and I got gastric reflux. Eventually I realised I was going to end up staying there much longer than planned, and my friends and I agreed that I’d pay a bit of rent and they’d give me a room where I could put my computer. Until then I’d been using their computer, but I didn’t have access to my programs or files – my memory, in other words. It took a long time to get the room ready. There were also maids in the house, sometimes one and sometimes two, which meant I had almost nowhere to go during the day other than into the computer; first my friends’, and then mine once it was set up. That’s when I first became addicted to playing card games, and I began staying awake until the early hours, far later than any normal person would. As if I only felt at home during the night. Though I still wasn’t at home. Sometimes I was left by myself and had to look after the house. If my friends were going away for a few days and I was in the house alone, on those days I wouldn’t go to sleep until eight in the morning. I couldn’t; I was on the alert all night, keeping watch. These altered sleeping hours of mine made apartment-hunting more and more difficult; my ex-wife helped, and sometimes Chl helped as well. All the ones I managed to go and see were terrible; some thoroughly miserable apartments. It looked like I’d have to consider paying more rent; to do that I’d have to start working intensively, and I knew I’d be able to, but it would take time, some months of being settled in my new place, before I could start. Then the summer came around, and for me every summer is like death. I realised I wouldn’t be able to rent anywhere until the autumn, and I would have been too weak to deal with moving anyway. In summer, my thoughts become muddled and I spend the whole time trying to escape my body. It’s because of the heat, but it’s more than that as well; there’s something really deadly about the summer, something that makes me feel hopeless and depressed, that wrings out my nerves, constantly, one by one.

Twice a week, on average, I took a taxi and went to see Chl. Back then, we still used to make love. Sometimes she’d come and see me at my friends’ house and we’d go for a walk. Even in summer, her presence was a tonic; she gave me strength, life, energy. Thinking about her was all that got me through that terrible period.