All the women I have loved have started visiting me in my dreams. They surface at random, they often entice my tears and my longing, and then they vanish without trace as soon as I press my lips on their sweet foreheads. The more innocent my love had been, the more likely are their visitations. I am in love with love itself, and that makes me ever so slightly apprehensive. How am I to maintain this sweetness during my waking hours, if not by succumbing to another false start, another exercise in futility? And who am I to judge true love and separate it from mere flesh of another woman who stares at me intently? As my fortieth birthday encroaches upon me, I appear to be poised for yet another fool’s errand.

Addendum I (March 18, 1994)

Ditto for the last few days, except that my lovers now appear to me in the waking hours, and that there is hardly a trace of love left between us. This time around it is all about fucking and nothing but fucking. At a breakneck pace I am recording all the hairy detail I can remember. The public life of my Residua thus appears to be over. But the excitement and the bliss of my recollections now appears to be worth this loss.

Addendum II (March 21, 1994)

This evening I was invited out for dinner by a couple from Pembridge Square, less than ten minutes from Hereford Road. As I was walking home at a leisurely pace, a thought flashed through my mind: all my sweet ladies are waiting for me at home! And I quickened my step in expectation of a happy reunion. The vulgarity of my recent writings notwithstanding, I do feel blessed by ticklish memories of so many fine women I have known through the years. Tonight I love them all, and each one of them in a very special way.

Addendum III (September 11, 1994)

My book, my harem.

Addendum IV (May 27, 1996)

It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the external world but with a doll fashioned in our brain—the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess.

From Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 2, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983, p. 384.