it felt, though maybe that should be “advancing years.” With the windows open, there is a lot of noise coming in from the street, and I have put on my muffs. I don’t know what possessed me to say that it sounds like the ocean—it never sounds like the ocean. I used to throw breadcrumbs out the window for the sparrows and pigeons but had to stop because of Potts and her husband, who complained about crumbs blowing into their living room. Sometimes I carry crumbs down to the sidewalk in a bag, if I am going down anyway, though I don’t usually remember until I am already in the street and happen to notice the birds. The bay windows are the reason I took this apartment in the first place—those and its being on the third floor, facing east, and not seeming expensive at the time, in relation to the money I had then. It is important that I see sunrises if I am going to keep my spirits up, as I believe I have explained already, so it matters what floor I am on. The apartment is in an old brick building that must have been posh at one time. Being just two blocks from the Connector is what made it not expensive, I suppose, because of the traffic noise and the frightening people who live under the overpass, and because of the compressors, and also, I think, because the building is not being kept up, was already not being kept up when I moved here, and that has only gotten worse. The windows have not been washed thoroughly since the young man I gave the TV to was here to clean them. He took the storm windows off and washed them along with the others, and in the fall of that year the same young man returned and put them in again, and I gave him the television. I called Giamatti about the windows again last fall, about how dirty they have become, and he said window washing was a tenant’s responsibility, even though it apparently was not my responsibility for the first five or six years I lived here, when someone came every spring and fall to wash them. They would even scrape all my old notes off with a razor blade and never complain. Window washing in those days was treated as such a matter of course that I was not even warned that they would be coming. They just came, in the fullness of time, like the seasons. I would look up, and there peering in a window would be some man on a ladder; I would notice the squeegee and think, “Oh, it must be spring.” Now the windows have become so filthy it is a wonder I can keep my spirits up at all. The table I use for eating and now also for typing stands in the center of the bay, as I think I mentioned as well. Or maybe not. With most of my pages on the floor I cannot go back and look and find out what things I have actually mentioned, as opposed to the things I merely considered mentioning, considered in passing, so to speak, and then didn’t. Cannot easily go back, I mean, as I probably could do it if I really wanted to. I don’t bend easily at the knees (I think I have mentioned my knees also), or at the waist either for that matter, so I don’t immediately pick the pages up when they fall off and now I have been walking on them. I generally neglect putting numbers on my pages, don’t forget so much as find it too tedious to bother, since I seldom remember to stop typing until I am so close to the bottom of the page it is about to fall out of the machine, and then I am usually in the middle of a sentence or in an agony of thought and in no mood to fuss with numbers. If I picked a page up from the floor now, I would not right off the bat know if it was page ten or page thirty. I used to think that one advantage typing had over ordinary unrecorded thinking was that one could go back over a pile of typed stuff and see what was in it. One cannot go over a pile of thought stuff in that way, because there is no pile, just thoughts falling endlessly down a hole, and even when you have managed to haul something up out of the hole you cannot know for sure whether it was down there all
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