The alarm clock placed by his pillow, undaunted by the humming of the fan, was marking off time with a dull tocking. The clock was a sardonic embellishment to his daily life, for he had never once used to it wake him. His consciousness flowed on, day and night, like a murmuring brook; he was long used at night to maintaining himself transparent like crystal within it, and the alarm clock was the friend, the Sancho Panza, that turned the custom into a comedy on his behalf. The cheap sound of its mechanism was a splendid source of comfort: it made a farce of any continuity in him.

The human mind, he explained, developed by the creation and progressive chemical reinforcement of neural networks of variable length, from two to fifty neurons, if not more. As a human brain contained several billion neurons, the number of combinations, and therefore of possible circuits, was staggering--it went way beyond, for example, the number of molecules in the universe.

The number of circuits used varied greatly from one individual to the next, which sufficed, according to him, to explain the countless gradations between idiocy and genius. But, even more remarkably, a frequently used neuronal circuit became, as a result of ionic accumulations, easier and easier to use--there was, in short, progressive self-reinforcement, and that applied to everything: ideas, addictions, and moods. The phenomenon was proven for individual psychological reactions as well as for social relations: to conscientize mental blocks only reinforced them; trying to settle a conflict between two people generally made it insoluble. Knowall then launched a pitiless attack on Freudian theory, which was not only based on no consistent physiological foundations, but also led to dramatic results that were directly contrary to the chosen goal. On the screen behind him, the succession of diagrams that had punctuated his speech stopped and was replaced by a brief and poignant documentary devoted to the mental--and sometimes unbearable--sufferings of Vietnam veterans. They couldn't forget, had nightmares every night, could no longer even drive or cross the street without assistance, they lived constantly in fear and it seemed impossible for them to readapt to a normal social life. It focused then on the case of a stooped, wrinkled man who had only a thin crown of disheveled red hair and who seemed to be truly reduced to a wreck: he trembled constantly, could no longer leave his house, and was in need of permanent medical asssistance; and he suffered, suffered without end. In the cupboard of his dining room he kept a little jar, filled with oil from Vietnam; every time he opened the cupboard and took out the jar, he broke down in tears.

"Stop," said Knowall. "Stop." The image froze on the close-up of the old man in tears. "Stupidity," continued Knowall. "Completed and utter stupidity. The first thing this man should do is take his bottle of Vietnamese soil and throw it out the window. Every time he opens the cupboard, every time he takes out the bottle--and sometimes he does it up to fifty times a day--he reinforces the neuro-circuit, and condemns himself to suffer a little more. Similarly, every time that we dwell on the past, that we return to a painful episode--and this is more or less what psychoanalysis boils down to--we increase the chances of reproducing it. Instead of advancing, we bury ourselves. Whenever we experience sadness, disappointment, something that prevents us from living, we must start by moving out, burning photos, avoiding talking to anyone about it. Repressed memories disappear; this can take some time, but they disappear in the end. The circuit deactivates itself."

The sole way, it seemed to her often enough when she was working at writing a poem, to use words with meaning, would be to choose words, for themselves, and invest them with her own meaning: not her own, perhaps, but meaning which was implicit in their shape, too frequently nothing to do with dictionary definition. The words which the tradition of her art offered her were by now, in chaos, coerced through the contexts of a million inanities, the printed page everywhere opiate, row upon row of compelling idiocies disposed to induce stupor, coma, necrotic convulsion; and when they reached her hands they were brittle, straining and cracking, sometimes they broke under the burden which her tense will imposed, and she found herself clutching their fragments, attempting again with this shabby equipment her raid on the inarticulate.

He's surrounded by untalented people, as we all are. Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people...
- Valentine, this is the last time ...
- Most original people are forced to devote all their time to plagiarizing. Their only difficulty is that is they have a spark of wit or wisdom themselves, they're given no credit. The curse of cleverness. Now wait, Brown. Stop. Stop there where you are and relax for a moment. We still have some business to straighten out. He needs to talk or he'll come to pieces, isn't that what you told me before he got here? Well let him talk, he's said some very interesting things. But don't let him talk to himself, that's all he's been doing, that's all he does when he talks to you and you don't listen, he knows you don't. Let him talk, then, but listen to him. He may not say anything clever, but that's just as well. Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. He paused.
- Come, my dear fellow. If you don't say anything I shan't be able to use you in this novel, the one in which Brown figures so monumentally since everyone thinks he's honest because he doesn't know how to be clever.

- Because, my dear fellow, no one knows what you're thinking. And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you're going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.

-Esther it isn't the secrecy, the darkness everywhere, so much as the lateness. I mean I get used to myself at night, it takes that long sometimes. The first thing in the morning I feel sort of undefined, but by midnight you've done all the things you have to do, I mean all the things like meeting people and, you know, and paying bills, and by night those things are done because by then there's nothing you can do about them if they aren't done, so there you are alone and you have the things that matter, after the whole day you can sort of take everything that's happened and go over it alone. I mean I'm never really sure who I am until night, he added.

-And do you know the worst thing? she went on. -Do you know the hardest thing of all? The waiting. A woman is always waiting. She's ... always waiting.

-Listen ... , he said. He'd withdrawn his hand on the table top automatically. -That's what it is, this arrogance, in this flamenco music this same arrogance of suffering, listen. The strength of it's what's so overpowering, the self-sufficiency that's so delicate and tender without an instant of sentimentality. With infinite pity but refusing pity, it's a precision of suffering, he went on, abruptly working his hand in the air as though to shape it there, -the tremendous tension of violence all enclosed in a framework, ... in a pattern that doesn't pretend to any other level but it's own, do you know what I mean? He barely glanced at her to see if she did.
-It's the privacy, the exquisite sense of privacy about it, he said speaking more rapidly, -it's the sense of privacy that most popular expressions of suffering don't have, don't dare have, that's what makes it arrogant. That what sentimentalizing invades and corrupts, that's what we've lost everywhere, especially here where they make every possible assault on your feelings and privacy. These things have their own patterns, suffering and violence, and that's ... the sense of violence within its own pattern, the pattern that belongs to violence like the bullfight, that's why the bullfight is art, because it respects its own pattern ...

This passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour ... what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original ... Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint you do not try to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates ... you do not invent shapes, you know them, auswendig wissen Sie, by heart ...