By the late 1940s I knew the blacks had something I was in dire need of, and I was young and intrepid and naive enough to no looking for it.

From 52nd to 140th Street the winds of change were blowing strong. The convulsions of black-rebellion music exploding out of the theaters and cafes of Harlem bad startled white musicians, turned us around; the music was angry, blazing, ferocious—yet always under a tight edge of control.

“It was an escape route, something entirely private,” Max Sebald mutters as he rummages through a thick folder of old photographs. A boy in a white gown and caftan; a graveyard with tilted headstones; a turn-of-the-century spa: they’re the kind of photographs you’d come across in a junk shop, leafing idly through a box of postcards. Which is more or less where Sebald found them. 

When the cheering and applause died down, I danced like I always have and always will, not thinking about good or evil but only about my dance, my honest and ever-so-pure dance

I have shamefully neglected this diary, in which I had meant to chronicle the art life of our metropolis, but the botheration of Christmas was too much for me. I dammed up, and until this sunny May morning, have had not the tiniest inclination to write a word in it. But I think I should capture a reference to last night’s dinner party. 

Sent: October 18

Sitting here in the middle of the late monsoon. The atmosphere is a bit grim with illness and mourning and pointless family dramas. My tummy is shaky but that doesn’t stop me from eating excessive amounts of delicious food. Went to a Tamil movie and was bewildered that it looked like MTV.

They tell of certain years in the Italian literary-prize business as the French would speak of a good or bad vintage year: the giddy splendors of 1965 prize-feting and fighting, the multiple crises of ’68 culminating in the sad death of Nobel poet Salvatore Quasimodo while presiding at some minor poetry prize event at Amalfi, and the year Moravia, out of pique or paradox, went out to found his own prize, giving the first award to his ex-wife in lieu (it’s said) of support payments.

There’s this man—a scientist, not a fiction writer—who interests me. Who has interested me for almost five years; who is so odd, so smart, so impossible to understand that I keep sifting through the facts of his life in search of a pattern.

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

My life this autumn has been astonishingly busy and empty, thanks to a seemingly endless set of tasks for small outcomes. In the midst of all this, my stepfather died, at the age of 100. Somehow I thought he would never die. He was like a sphinx in the desert, always there, always posing riddles in my direction.