Exit (iii), by Gabriella Boyd. Courtesy the artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam, London, New York City

Try, start here, try bringing a pot of coffee out into the sun in despite of the hot weather, and sit at your chair and table ready for all possible assimilations. Include with the coffee something slightly intensely sweet: not slightly sweet but slightly intensely, since all intensities only need to be slight at this point. Sit and drink the coffee and eat the chocolate, and here is the thing: stop making the mistake of trying to show other people that furthermost corner of yourself, it is good for one thing only, walk calmly over and ask them for it back. Remember, for instance, that telling people you are reading Tolkien late at night fatally alters the chemical composition of doing this. Also, stop celebrating. Or, qualifying that a little, remember that celebrating can also be very privately sitting drinking your coffee on a sunny morning, watching people go past in the street and reading a book you may not finish. Yes you have been blessed and baffled with success lately, and also god yes there is the ferocity of having a new lover, but what about behaving as if none of these things were relevant to your own strict project? Sometimes accuracy must take the place of expansiveness.

So leaving all these things not where you can see them but all right where you can just about feel the light-brown confidence of them, take yourself off into another room. They must not be useful even to cast your thoughts towards in moments of hesitation. Instead the finger of the mind must be poised to run down a skirt of dusky-pink satin, or over a white tablecloth embroidered in blackwork, or yes must curve and thrill at the strong coffee drunk outside in the sun. Or picture a gorge worn in English limestone, grassy at the top and then rocky as it winds downhill, with moss and trees and water bubbling: this entirely meaningless place get you there and gaze. This is what is so difficult to learn, to stop talking, stop anticipating, stop being vigilant in your ancient unnecessary way. The time as it passes isn’t it cool, and exquisitely textured like linen?

What else? Rather than announcing various refusals in the name of your own well-being, you would do better to find things to say yes to. Sometimes do make yourself tremble by agreeing to everything that is suggested, tremble at everything you yourself have the potential to do. Then you can reinstall the proper curtains which divide the possible from the actually impossible, and perhaps choose a new pattern or style for them or insert additional pleats where there were no pleats—though all the same, remember you are not designing a hotel, you will have to live here. Likewise it is almost certain that neither aubergine roasted with harissa, nor a navy T-shirt bought for three pounds from Oxfam, nor a book about the history of Baghdad, will entirely solve the problem because the problem exists elsewhere, as if in flowing water while you are sitting on the bank. Dip a hand in, would be one possibility, and feel how water is unattached to any of these bought and sold objects, how water wishes most of all to collapse into itself yet depends on its own surface tension to resist this until the very end. Or you could notice how your lover’s skin requires no accoutrements to be warm and lightly haired, or how the pleasure of their fingertips on your lower back loops and bunches and builds until the word pleasure ceases to make sense, like a bursting of the idea of pleasure in fact, into smithereens. Afterwards, yes, you can sit up in bed and read Walt Whitman while they sleep.

Then going into the office the next morning you can take an unreligious but still fairly pious joy in the answering of emails and the making of phone calls, because there is a satisfaction here that can be trickled out like sand, and because you can feel how each of those other realms is kept steady and will wait for you to come back. Try taking on the buttoned-up calm of someone who has pledged their life to a service and forbidden themselves from ever doubting their choice. So what if—all that? One day you will find a cotton sundress that fits you beautifully, it cannot be doubted. In the meantime you have a committee to circulate papers for, and you must adjudicate on your team’s annual leave, and your boss is relying on you to keep at bay someone who has been trying to get a meeting for weeks. Indeed there is a certain benefit in having a boss: someone you can serve without having to be grateful to them: which is a restful and low-risk experiment in true submission, and which also explains the ubiquitous narrative gesture consisting of the sudden command Turn around, the wordless lifting of the skirt, the being bent forwards over the varnished mahogany desk, and so on. The fantasy of comprehensiveness, is the thing, that the remit of the boss could be infinitely enlarged across your whole life. Remember, though, that like most people you would only wish to serve someone who wanted from you the things you already want from yourself: so, what would be the point? Whatever you may wishfully think, you do not need to be enforced to be effectual.

Honestly your power of forgetting all these things or at least of living as if you didn’t know them is quite impressive. You are in the running to become a campus perpetual, the amount of time you luxuriously spend there drinking tea with friends in the shade outside the café, modeling for others the long-form delight of having finished a Ph.D. The class of campus perpetuals is not a bad one to belong to, they like you there, they ought to, you’ve hung around now for years—but perhaps it is like drinking only the water vapor which rises from the earth, rather than water in the form of actual water. At least (if you can be persuaded of one thing) take to heart that summer is nearly over, there is a tide of knitwear and teacakes making its way towards you, and you had better make sure you can still think and read and write in complete paragraphs, since that is or at least ought to be the cooling effect of autumn. On the other hand, your problem is that you often keep your present too sharply angled towards the future: one success and you are writhing with it, as if all is coming. Remember, for instance, that wearing mascara is always an invitation for the mascara to run.

And indeed stop trying to be the clear cool voice of truth, however compassionate like rain. (Yes, we are finally having rain after a long drought.) You have only one person’s capacity for life, and things run over by the tongue always feel bigger than they really are. There are different schools of thought on whether it would be a waste of a day just to sit watching the rain. But whatever the conclusion, try to refrain from enthusing in anything other than the narrowest most central part of yourself—and there enthuse day and night, ignore sleep, enthusiasm is a project which cannot rest. Reverence the rain as something we have all needed, including you, and summer rain above all as the blessing no one is able to bestow on themselves or anyone else. And remember how you and your friend once sat under the awning of the café while it rained and rained, and were treated with special friendliness by the staff, partly (let us assume) because it was raining and you were nonetheless choosing to sit there and buy things, but also seemingly because they liked you both, they enjoyed the air of playful discussion you gave off, the two of you drew people in with your obvious chemistry and affection, and from that alone you can deduce (what you know already) that such friendships are rare like whales, you could travel your whole ocean life and never encounter one.

What you want—now we come to it—is style that comes from a very full and considered embrace of everything, except the idea of evil, which you must not credit. The world is wonderfully everything that is wonderfully the case, something like that. But a warning: the more you are like this, the younger people will think you are, because it is considered abnormal to plunge with an absolutely cheerful and fixated eye. The more you are like this, the better you will write and the worse you will dress.

One thing you might experiment with further is lending out certain permissions of yourself. Did not your friend say a few months ago, Fill some notebooks, and have you not been slowly putting this into practice and finding it gratifying? Your notebooks are filling! with thoughts that sometimes are clean and sparkling, and other times burrowing and twisting like fox tunnels in the earth. So perhaps allow another friend to decide whether you should have a beer with lunch, or to press a book on you which you will actually undertake to read, or to choose the color you will paint your bathroom. Allow your timetable to be gently pulled out of shape or wiped blank, as a way of allowing yourself to be gently pulled out of shape or even wiped blank. Spend a day with your lover in which there are no plans, in fact come to treat the idea of plans with deep suspicion, as if irreversibly corrupted: not always, just sometimes. You need time to notice that the grass is a little greener again and the trees a little fuller after yesterday’s rain, this is the second half of the joy of rain which has its own unquestionable structure, a better structure indeed for deciding how to fill time—fill time, what a notion—than the making of actual plans. What is this rule you’ve absorbed that you are not allowed to lie on your bed reading a book in the middle of the day? You cannot be serious.

What else, then? It seems you do at least understand that there is no point in trying to do too much, and the main thing now is making sure you don’t do too little. The slack in the line should only be very slight, perceptible more to you than to anyone else. Or perhaps what you must convey is that if your time appears like a dress cut quite loosely, with room to move, that is its deliberate cut, it’s not that you have bought the wrong size. Or your time is a lawn, requiring nightly watering to produce its densest lushest green, though of course you must be wary of any metaphor that depends on a monoculture. Or your time is a paragraph, which whatever it does in the middle must have its beginnings and ends placed quite carefully.

So now returning to the question of how to celebrate, tend towards austerity. You adore the sitting praying, the obedient getting up early, you cannot forget the solemn hymn tune in its ancient minor mode. Last night you woke your lover up to cry, that is all right, but in the morning you must quietly say goodbye to them and go to your desk. And there anything can be extended or pressed down on itself or pleasurably kneaded, anything. Take your copy of one of the lesser-known plays, perhaps All’s Well That Ends Well, and read it carefully with attention to each obscure phrase, solving one Shakespearean problem after another. Or else go to the world, by which Shakespeare means, get married.

And armed with these techniques and precepts you will be able to think, my god, every time I sit down to write I might discover anything at all. Remember that your whole life is like a diary of life, indexed to various long novels you have read and various cups of coffee you have drunk with friends. Some of this must be kept: be patient: there is never any rush. Soon, soon it will be time once again for Henry James, and his paragraphs each one like a new civilization: autumn is coming: which is to say, all.