We’re driving through the mountains of France talking about affluence. Looking at the map this morning, John noticed that affluence is the French word for the tributaries of a river. He wonders if the word once suggested a great river of wealth flowing into smaller affluences. Was it comforting for people to think of money replenishing itself in a regenerative cycle with the rains? Along with affluence, there are liquid assets, and trickle-down economics, and the rising tides that float all boats. Why is water so often a metaphor for money? Perhaps because we like to believe that our economic system is naturally occurring, not man-made. Maybe the movement of money feels inevitable if you imagine it as water, with only blameless gravity participating in the accumulation of wealth.

The poets gave away their own books, handbound sometimes, and letterpress broadsides made on antiquated machinery, they gave their time to editing each other’s work in their bedroom offices, they paid to have it printed, they carried each other’s books in suitcases to give to other poets, they used their day jobs at copy shops to print chapbooks and zines, they performed their work for nothing but applause, and they gave each other places to stay, couches to sleep on. Not for profit, but for literature. I guess, I tell him, it’s easy for me to believe there’s an alternative to capitalism because I feel like I’ve lived it. Within capitalism, of course.

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.”