I was lying in bed with Eleven and had a sense of unease. There was something in the back of my mind."What is it?" I wondered to myself and tried to think. I used to get the identical feeling on Sundays when I had court on Monday. "No, it's not that."

I had just come from the bathroom after showering. I went back to the bathroom to pee. There it was.

I have tried to finish The Garden of Eden. I have been doing a lot of reading, it is true. Many days I study for hours with Ana. I don't feel like doing anymore reading when we're done. But that wasn't the whole explanation. It's ugly, that's what it is; it is an ugly, dark, mad book and it makes me uneasy. Insanity does that, makes us feel ill at ease. And I know what's coming. I had forgotten though the details in the build up, like in The Shining. You know what I'm talking about, right? Everybody's seen The Shining. If you haven't, don't.

I keep the book everywhere. On my desk where I am now. In the main bathroom. I want to have something to read when...I have to have something to read.

"Braver Than We Knew" was Doctorow's review headline. Yes. I don't know how he did it. "How much self-inflicted pain can I endure?" seems to have been what pushed him on. 

Hemingway wrote it, what there is of it (250,000 words, reportedly), over something like fifteen years after World War II. For about half of those years he was at his pinnacle. Then he declined. In the end he killed himself because he couldn't write anymore. "The first half", according to Charles Scribner, Jr., was "wholly harmonious and coherent". I found the beginning so. He must have written "the first half" in the fecund first half of those post-war years. "The second half", was "incomplete". "Coherent": by exclusion that means that the second half was not "wholly coherent". I have found it so. Like an insane person.