December 29. The sparkle of the sea is truly extraordinary, and we puzzled over whether anything about the astronomical height of the sun or the clarity of the water contributes to it. We manage quite well to really do nothing at all for long stretches of the day. To sleep unhealthily long, to stay in bed outrageously long. Yes, J is practicing Don Juan, yes, I’m writing an essay, but it’s really less than we should be doing.
December 28. Now I have realized that I do not want to leave any traces in the physical world. No coffin, no urn, no tombstone. It’s like with books. I want them to materialize while they are being read, and beyond that to exist only in storage devices and in the mind. I want to dissolve into pure information. And make it as easy as possible for people to forget me.
December 27. Yesterday SCUBA diving. The suddenly opened third dimension, and not only that, but the ability to move freely in all three dimensions, I find even more spectacular than the fish, sea urchins and corals. I used SCUBA equipment once, that was forty years ago, and we passed the mouthpiece around in circles on the floor in the swimming pool. Here again learning to breathe with confidence underwater. Then while we swam out to the reef, I lost almost all situational awareness and only did roughly what the others were doing. Controlling buoyancy with the compressed air vest rather difficult. Visibility wasn’t great and at one point I suddenly couldn’t see any of the others, which I figured probably made our instructors pretty nervous. I surfaced and saw the buoy with the dive flag and swam back there.
December 26. The long-beaked birds that circle over the sea in the morning and come considerably close to our house, I consider to be herons or cormorants, not pelicans, because pelicans certainly exist only in the Caribbean. They are pelicans.
December 25, Rincón, Puerto Rico. I find the luxury of this villa we rented mysterious. The walls plastered brilliant white, arches everywhere, tile floors in a large diagonal checkerboard pattern, the double doors that open onto the sea made of teak that shimmers like whiskey, brass hardware. The furniture is of darker wood, it is richly but not exuberantly ornamented, with rattan covering. Two floors, upstairs a giant bed with canopy, from which thin white veils hang, downstairs the terrace with a small pool, whose steps start just below the threshold of the double door. It is illuminated in two levels – either constant yellow-orange, or in fluently changing colors.
If it were just a matter of pulling together enough aesthetics to justify the price, you’d need less. It wouldn’t have been necessary to prepare a dinner for us, with double cutlery and double plates, cloth napkins and the food next to them in plastic boxes, an orchid on the table, champagne and a cake from the best bakery in Puerto Rico, Someone must have a joy in it, a passion for it that goes beyond the mere need to make money from it.
Stars extremely clear, even Milky Way, although pool and terrace lit and the lights of Mayaguez on the horizon. Orion unusually vertical above us. And iguanas in the garden this morning. They glide across the lawn like streamlines, slender as an arrow, almost a meter long. Then we see one sitting motionless under bushes at the edge of the garden, which I, because huge, at first think is a mockup, but it is alive, eyeing us intently, and then shuffling off into the undergrowth.
December 24. I think I remember that my parents have great contempt for people who, like us, fly to the South Sea for Christmas. The three Seas of the World: North Sea, Baltic Sea and South Sea.
December 23. My addiction to attract attention without wanting the slightest contact with anyone. It’s actually no different with clothes than it is with writing. For heaven’s sake, no comments. A view is enough.
December 22. I get a little impatient when I set my vacuum robot and my mop robot down somewhere in the apartment and press CLEAN. Have they learned the floor plan correctly yet? Do they notice which room they are in? Have I moved enough stuff out of the way? I don’t want to worry about that anymore, especially after the recent progress in writing essays and drawing pictures. Today, I just kept sitting at the piano. My robot vacuum nudged me several times and finally ran the rotary brush over my foot, which felt like a thousand crabs.
December 21. In the subway, on escalators, on backpacks the logos of companies I encounter online each day.
December 20. I should add to yesterday that we have no friends here, in Manhattan. In other parts of the world we have friends, but they are very, very few, and we are far from them.