Perhaps there remains for us/ Some tree on a hillside.

And perhaps not even that.

I have, of late, neglected my Rilke.

Ah yes, a pipe of O to bed and read the elegies. What better.

And yet my working world is nothing if not intimate. Suffused all day long in the anima and yet I've banished it from the home. I return to a hearth of my own calculations. One can no more request anything of the soul than one can of the wind, and yet in an attempt to shake up the hemispheres of my mind I decided, last night, that I would masturbate with my left hand. I cannot claim to have filled myself with the grace of god but, certainly, I slept like a baby and, waking slowly, remembered my dreams. There are far worse ways of trying to enter middle age.

Gareth smiled as we passed in the hall.

Clearly, he has news that he wants me to know I don't know.

Tomorrow I shall tread on his foot.