THE APPROACH OF WINTER WAS GENTLE AS THE MOON OF long nights waned. With my blood flowing warm and well from the gym, with my paper cup of hot coffee and my smokes, my mind yet wandered comfortably as I sat in the mornings on that bench feeling the coming of whatever warmth the day would know.

The fear that I had tried so much to plumb, classify, and understand, I now saw, was but a chimera. What fear there was in me was of that chimera. I had sought its origin in my past, but its origin, like that of the origin of this universe in which I, and everybody else, was but a meaningless, fleeting, passing note of nothingness, was not knowable. Theory was the mother of stupidity. Fearlessness and fear were one. One rid oneself of the chimera; one simply was. It did not pay to fear any more than it did to worry. Almost all, if not all, of what we feared, like almost all, if not all, that we worried about, never in our lives came to be. A brave man dies only once, a coward dies a thousand times, sacrificing a piece of himself to feed the chimera every time he does.

The chimera lived on booze, too. Booze was a great fear maker. When I ducked into the bar with my coffee every now and then, to escape a sudden biting chill, I looked around, I listened, and I knew that. I didn’t even need to look around, to listen. The place could just as well have been empty. Merely looking into myself, seeing myself at the bar with my booze and my beer, I knew it.

Yes, booze was the fear maker, the drainer and destroyer of one’s self and one’s life. I had surrendered these things, my self and my life, to it. I was a fool, a fool more foolish than most. I loved my life now, every breath of it. I enjoyed thieving more than ever before. And the biggest thievery, the stealing back of my own self and life, I enjoyed most of all.

The booze, the blood, the desperation. I’d had my fill. I had survived on the surface of the earth for a long time now. Before long, with good fortune, I would be twice the age that Alexander the Great had reached. He was a character who had always intrigued me, conquering the world so young, going down so young, so fast, with a golden drinking goblet of fear in his hand. I once had wanted to write the story of his last night on this earth that he conquered, this former private student of Aristotle, this young man so wise beyond his years, who would vanquish the world, but whom in the end drink conquered. What did he fear? What was his unknown, unknowable chimera?

Suetonius tells of Julius Caesar standing before a statue of Alexander, sighing to reflect that however long he lived, he would be as nothing to the shadow of that man. The next night, he woke shaken and shocked by a dream of raping his own mother. His soothsayers shored him, telling him that this dream augured great things. It meant, they told him, that he would conquer the world.

What had been Alexander’s dream? These were things that fascinated and beguiled me. This was why I had wanted to make a tale of history and dreams, of fucking one’s mother and all of the world, of demons and of drink. But who would want it? In this age, Alexander and Aristotle meant nothing. They were nobodies, except perhaps in name, who had never even texted or tweeted. Alexander the Great? Aristotle? No market value. Hoi polloi twaddle, the milk toast slurry and fodder of which best-sellers were made—now we were talking. Would Alexander have even cared to conquer this world?

He had conquered the world, but not himself. That’s what I wanted to do: subdue and possess the world that was in myself.

Part of this, I knew, was inseparable from ridding my life of the bourne stones of its freedom. True, I was freer than most; but I was not as free as I could be.

Soon I would get a driver’s license. I had never had one. This would give me the freedom to travel alone to an idyllic little town I had come across in the middle of deep-wooded nowhere in eastern Pennsylvania. The grandiose, delusional expectations of youth were behind me now, and all I really yearned for was a few years of peace and quiet and solitude at the end of the road, a little place with a hammock strung between two great old trees in the breezes of being. A driver’s license would allow me the means to get there when I wanted. It would demolish one of the bourne stones of my freedom. Whether I could yet cut the umbilical cord that held me to the corpse of this city was something that remained to be seen, and it had to do with an even greater bourne stone. But in the desire for freedom there was strength. I entertained traveling back and forth between here and there for a while. Whether I could afford both my Manhattan place and my little place with a hammock also remained to be seen, but this was a matter of hard reality, not desire and strength. We would see.

And I knew that I had to turn my back and walk away from this business of writing. It was not what it once had been. No matter what publishers claimed, the racket was now only a vestigial withering on the much bigger dying racket of conglomerated business itself. And freedom of speech was dying, and literacy was dying, and reading was dying.

Just as important, I no longer felt a need to assert my own existence by communicating to others. And on the occasions when I did, I felt there was no one out there at the other end.

Only an utter fool would rather express himself than simply be himself. To live was a beautiful thing. To write about it was a labor. And the pay had given way to pay cuts.

Writing was not an act of the imagination or, may the Devil take me for even using the word, creativity. (How I cringed when people used the word “creative” in referring to me in my presence. I knew then and there that they did not know what work was. I knew then and there that they lived in a dream world. Often they themselves were make-believe “artists,” living the “creative” life under the shelter of trust funds, inheritances, or family money of some kind. Often they were trying to imply an intimacy that did not, could not exist with me or what I did.) There was absolutely nothing to be romanticized in what I did. If flower garlands of words and phantoms of imagery had come to me in visions, so had some of the stupidest fucking ideas I have ever had: ideas that landed me in jail, emergency rooms, or hock.

No. The seduction of writing in one’s impressionable years could prove fatal in one’s later years.

In the folly and self-torture of trying to say what cannot be said lies nothing but ruin. This is why the greatest of writers have in the end always forsaken words for silence. As George Steiner said: “The true masters are those who relinquish their vocation.” In this regard, he mentions Tolstoy. I would summon Dante, Rimbaud, Pound, Beckett. It was Rimbaud who saw the light earliest, quitting the racket six days before his twenty-first birthday, to run guns and coffee in Africa. But it was Pound who put it best, after fifty-seven years’ work on his Cantos:

“I have tried to write Paradise / Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise.”

Yes, the greatest of writers have always forsaken words to embrace and cede to the more expressive powers of silence. I was not great, but in an age bereft of any greatness whatsoever, I could pass for it.

So why go on writing? It was no longer a means to freedom. It was barely anymore even a means to make a buck. It just stole your real life and immured you in a sort of counter-life, neither here nor there. There were no holy words, no words that bore wisdom. Holiness and wisdom belonged to silence alone. To believe otherwise was vain arrogance; and worse, to know this and to persevere in the exaltation of words was to become the cheap carny barker of lies peddled as truth—a degradation and a wrongfulness, and nothing more.