Sara gives me The Unquiet Grave, the book Cyril Connolly wrote the year he turned forty, when he was struggling with the question of what he wanted out of life. I can give this to you, Sara says, laughing, because you’re not unhappy with your work. She means my writing. “Approaching forty, sense of total failure,” Connolly writes. He has spent his life on comforts, traveling and running up debts. He likes soft cheeses and warm baths, but he fears that he is losing himself to pleasure. He sloshes with alcohol, as he puts it, and his mind has become “a worn gramophone record.”

Pleasure is not necessarily harmful, he writes. But it “outrages that part of us which is concerned with growth.” He wants to be more than he is. He is stagnating in his gin and whiskey, and in his memories of long afternoons in Paris. He wants to write a great work. He thinks he might have to give up his pleasures and suffer like the writers he admires. But he’s not entirely convinced, as among his pleasures is the pleasure of writing: “O sacred solitary empty mornings, tranquil meditations—fruit of book-case and clock-tick, of note-book and arm-chair; golden and rewarding silence, influence of sun-dappled plane-trees, far-off noises of birds and horses, possession beyond price of a few cubic feet of air and some hours of leisure.”