Last night I had this dream. In the dream, I was searching through some writing on which I was working for a missing page; a page somewhere in the middle had become lost, and I could no longer work on the piece without that missing page. I remember leafing through the pages, turning over the last ordered one (as if the missing page had been typed on the back of it), and shuffling through the front pages as if the missing page were merely misplaced. Of course.

At the moment, I am not working on any writing, and so perhaps my dream represents either a writer’s block dream, or a writer’s dream, which may a redundancy! If the former, then I must feel in my writing life somewhat . . . stuck. I am afraid to sit down and struggle with almost anything that would require some intellectual effort. I think right now I don’t have any spare reserve to use for my writing. I am at best distracted, and at worst, well, incapable of devoting any imaginative effort to anything but daily functioning. So much seemingly that needs to be done that I cannot imagine even an hour devoted almost selfishly to writing.

But perhaps the latter is true, and the dream means that I am searching for a writing project, and that the missing page is the page I should be writing now. Perhaps even this is that page.

I once wrote a paper on S.Y. Agnon’s story “The Book That Was Lost.” In that essay I talked about how my reading is motivated by a vague search for the answer to an unasked question (a borrowing here from Thoreau’s (Walden). I argued there that the answer for my life was always in the book that was lost, and so I have made it my life’s quest to the search for that book. When I find it, I will know.

Of course I realize that any answer is useless without the right question, and as suggested above, the question is yet unknown and unasked.

No book I’m reading at present inspires me, though Taylor’s A Secular Age intrigues. The names and detail overwhelms me; I sense that Taylor is putting into the text everything he has been thinking over his entire life. But the substance of his thought: how we have “buttressed” the self, and therefore, made ourselves impervious to the mystery and unknown; created order for ourselves in order to improve ourselves because this improvement is not God’s work; created our ethics to facilitate our flourishing; and evolved a developing humanism in to which we have retreated from our attachment to God. God has become at best immanent, but at worst, irrelevant if not wholly absent.

I am also reading a book by Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within, about the Marranos in fifteenth century Spain and Portugal. As I understand him, Yovel argues that our modern day self derives from this split. Alienated and alienating condition of the Spanish Jews forced to renounce their Judaism but incapable of doing so wholly.

I came across the word quiddity. It refers to the essence of a thing. I remembered that Joyce used it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I’ve been thinking of that word with regard to stories—like Joyce’s Dubliners, which as I learned them, were about epiphanies. In each the main character comes to some profound realization that puts his/her life into a wholly different perspective; the character’s understanding of herself changes. Quiddities. The essence of the thing. Stories about essences. Of course, as a post modernist, I don’t believe in essence, but as a fragile human I think I do. That is, at the heart of everything is a complexity that is also an essence.

And I want the complexity of Henry James and Philip Roth. I am in awe of the psychological complexities evident in both, but the narrative complexity of Roth intrigues me. For example, in I Married a Communist, Zuckerman narrates from his position as a 64 year old successful writer but a recluse, and he narrates from his own experiences with Ira and Murray, even as Murray narrates the story of Ira that Zuckerman didn’t know about Ira.

On the one hand, the book reveals the complexity of character. In Ira what appears simple political motivation turns out to be a very complex response to a very personal and individual life. But the same seems true of Eve: her marriages as an attempt to escape her Jewishness, and her own entrapment in her attempt to escape leads her to the alliance which will produce her memoir, I Marrried a Communist (ah the complexity of that title to this story, Zuckerman’s novel, (I Married A Communist), even now excites me) which will effectively destroy not only Ira Ringold, but her self as well. Eve’s relationship to her daughter, Sylphide, herself an attempt to escape her Jewishness, Together, perhaps, Zuckerman and Murray write the story of the Jew in Modern America--