Teapot and manuscript

Sometimes the writer gets up late at night or very early in the morning and has so much fun he doesn't want to go back to sleep, he can't imagine sleeping, sleeping only feels like something he should be doing, not something he wants to do. He feels like the luckiest man in the world – he has light, a piece of paper and a pen, books to read, access to good washer, vanilla ice cream, and vodka.

It's like he's been given a passport to the realm Buckminster Fuller referred to when he said to the lady who asked him what it might feel like to live in outerspace, "Madame, you're living in outerspace." He's free to read deeply into the novel of Javier Marias (The Infatuations) and find these words – "it's quite shameful the way reality imposes so many little limits on itself," and understand for a moment or two what it means before the meaning goes completely away.

The phone doesn't ring, the little kids next-door aren't crying nor is the mother yelling at them in a German accent that sounds like she's unhappy she ever had them. Part of a reader's job is to forgive, someone once said, another writer no doubt, though he can't remember the writer's name.