My thoughts and my writing style hand in hand churn out, like a thresher, paragraph after paragraph, and when I read anything over, like relaxing after work, it seems only like notes I have managed, always a beginning, always a prologue.

The waters of two major rivers in the world flow north, the Nile which creates the fertile crescent in Mesopotamia, and the Genesee River, which flows into Lake Ontario in Western New York, through Rochester, and which originates in stony creeks in Pennsyvania. These two rivers are also of approximately equal length, I saw, as I compared two maps of their respective regions, spread out under my fingers on the round oak table in our dining room, here in Rochester. I closed my eyes and transposed these territories, lifting the fertile crescent into the air--my imagination--and settling it, lightly (as it was only made of air, and resting on air, and transparent) over the other locality, whose topography and layout of towns I know so well. And it fit, so now I had some kind of ultimate board game.

The key element in the new person must come from the future--this is what occurs to me when I hear someone give their lineage back a few generations. Obviously, it becomes more dilute, in terms of producing a new person. So if the new addition element that makes a person comes not from the past, it must come from the future. Or sideways in from other regions, Mort.

What are you protecting all the time, what is this kernel of awareness that is like a self that is in jeapordy and has to keep reminding itself with a slap, to stay in play, and all the time. It isn’t survival, it is the sense of being constantly threatened, or rising to a challenge as if to address an outstanding issue that requires you, demanding vigilance. This person has been there all along, and is not to be countermanded, or figured out as, say, the captain of his soul, but he is obscurity and singularity. Personal identity is not determined by it’s history, not back to to the embryo do you go, Monsieur, but it is more like you leap onto the stage from the wings. Thought proceeds everything.