Ali Khamenei

I read the piece in Foreign Affairs (Sept./Oct, 2013) about Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, at the Cody, Wyoming public library the day before I left for San Francisco and thought about it a lot during the long road trip through Utah and Nevada.

He says pretty much the same thing Solzhenitsyn said about the difference between the East and the West: that compared to the East, the West is drowning in materialism, which has become its greatest enemy. He thinks the greatest novel ever written is Victor Hugo's, Les Miserables. He really praises the book, like it's the only novel ever written or that ever needs to be written, and so I felt a rapport with Khamenei and my theory that a century can only really produce one or, at the most, two poets.

I had some weird dreams in hotel rooms in Salt Lake City and Reno. I think dreams have lives and after-lives, and that the dreams I forget are the most interesting dreams. I had one dream that was so powerful it woke me up and I wanted to get back into it and I almost did, but in the end I just couldn't. I did everything right too: I closed my eyes, I lay as I'd been laying, I conjured up the scene I'd been seeing, then I fell asleep again but failed to get back into the dream that had seemed so wonderful.

Finally, I got back to San Francisco. The moment I opened the door to the house I realized this is my home. I can't imagine living anywhere else--the ocean air, the fog, the little streets in the little neighborhoods, the house itself with the one room that has such a great view of the bridge that I can't see half the time because of the fog.

I woke up at 2:30 a.m. came downstairs and read in The Recognitions, a book I've been reading for at least a month. It might take me longer to read the book than it took Gaddis to write it. I used to read The Red and the Black once a year at a certain time in the life--I'm thinking it was between the ages of 28-35--because there was so much information there that I needed. I really think that Stendahl intended it to be some sort of instruction manual on how to be a man, as well as being the great tragic tale that it is.

I read Gaddis for about an hour, then went back to bed and had a dream I can't remember. I don't like it when I waste dreams. The only thing I can remember about the dream I had last night is the feeling for the present it left me with--that I live in a time of unprecedented population and literacy but the literacy, while intelligent, is intelligent about material things, and that everything's becoming more and more abstract, distant and more distant, meaningless and more meaningless.