The book about baseball has a green cover, incidentally, which is possibly appropriate.

Conversely there does not appear to be a single book about art in this house.

My reason for remarking on this is not personal. Rather I find it unusual simply because of another painter once seeming to have lived here.

Then again the other painter may have only been a guest. In which case the painting of the house may well have been done as a sort of gift, in return for her visit.

Though in suggesting that, I am of course forgetting the several other paintings in certain of the rooms here that I do not go into, and to which the doors are closed.

Possibly those other paintings are paintings by the same painter, as well.

In fact I am certain that they are, in spite of my not having looked at any of them since closing the doors, which I did some time ago.

The only one of the closed doors which I any longer open is the one to the room where the atlas and the life of Brahms are, and that has been happening only lately.

It is scarcely a demanding proposition to determine that all three paintings on the walls of the same house have been painted by the same painter, however.

More especially when all three are paintings of houses at, or near, a beach, as I have now remembered that the other two are also.

Though I naturally possess more practiced equipment for making such a determination, should that become necessary.

In either event, what now occurs to me is that the painter was doubtless not a guest in this house either, but more likely was somebody who lived nearby. Which would more readily explain why there are three paintings by her in a house in which there are an inordinate number of books but not one of those books is about art.

Being so closely familiar with the painter's subject matter, the people who did live in this house would have presumably been delighted to display such paintings.

No question of aesthetic understanding would have had to enter into the arrangement at all.

For that matter perhaps all of the houses along this beach, or many of them, contain other examples of the same painter's work.

Perhaps even the very house which I burned to the ground contained such examples, even though it would obviously not contain them any longer, no longer being a house.

Well, it is still a house.

Even if there is not remarkably much left of it, I am still prone to think of it as a house when I pass it in taking my walks.

There is the house that I burned to the ground, I might think. Or, soon I will be coming to the house that I burned to the ground.

None of the three paintings in this house is signed, incidentally.

Actually, I do not remember looking, but I am positive that looking is something I would have done.

Even in museums, it is something I often do.

I have even done it with paintings that I have been familiar with for years.

I hardly do it because I believe that there might be any error in the attribution of a painting.

In fact I have no idea why I do it.

Frequently, Modigliani would sign the work of other painters. This was so they would be able to sell paintings that they otherwise might not have sold.

Doubtless I should not have said frequently. Doubtless Modigliani did this only a handful of times.

Still, it was kind of Modigliani, since a certain number of his friends were not eating very well.

In fact Modigliani himself often did not eat well, although basically this would have been because he was drinking, instead.

Once, in the Borghese Gallery, in Rome, I signed a mirror.

I did that in one of the women's rooms, with a lipstick.

What I was signing was an image of myself, naturally.

Should anybody else have looked, where my signature would have been was under the other person's image, however.

Doubtless I would not have signed it, had there been anybody else to look.

Though in fact the name I put down was Giotto.

There is only one mirror in this house, incidentally.

What that mirror reflects is also an image of myself, of course.

Though in fact what it has also reflected now and again is an image of my mother.

What will happen is that I will glance into the mirror and for an instant I will see my mother looking back at me.

Naturally I will see myself during that same instant, as well.

In other words all that I am really seeing is my mother's image in my own.

I am assuming that such an illusion is quite ordinary, and comes with age.

Which is to say that it is not even an illusion, heredity being heredity.

Still, it is the sort of thing that can give one pause.

Even if it has also entered my mind to realize that I may be almost as old, by now, as my mother was then.

My mother was only fifty-eight.

Though she was exactly fifty, when I painted her portrait.

Well, it was that birthday for which I painted it.

Though I rarely did portraits.

There were times when I regretted that I had never done a portrait of Simon, however.

Other times I did not believe I would have wished to possess such a reminder.

And perhaps it was their anniversary that I painted my mother and father's portraits for.

In fact it was their thirtieth anniversary.

I painted both of the portraits from slides, meaning the gift to be a surprise.

What this made it necessary to do was to hang dropcloths in my studio, so as to contrive a dark corner in which I could make use of the projector.

Generally I seemed to spend more time walking in and out of the darkness, than actually painting.

To tell the truth, what I generally spent the greatest amount of time doing was sitting, whenever I painted.

At times one can sit endlessly, before getting up to add a single brushstroke to a canvas.

Leonardo was known to walk halfway across Milan to do that, with The Last Supper, even when anybody else would have believed it was finished.

Which did not keep The Last Supper from beginning to deteriorate in Leonardo's own lifetime, however, because of a foolish experiment he had tried, with oil tempera on the plaster.

In a manner of speaking, one could even say that The Last Supper was already deteriorating while it was still being painted.

For some reason the thought of this has always saddened me.

Often, too, I was surprised that so many people did not seem to know that The Last Supper was a painting of a Passover meal.

I did not stop in Milan, in any case, on my way from Venice to Savona.

For that matter I had hardly intended to stop at Savona.

An embankment gave way. I have no idea how long the embankment had been deteriorating before I got there.

Leonardo wrote in his notebooks backwards, from right to left, so that they had to be held up to a mirror to be read.

In a manner of speaking, the image of Leonardo's notebooks would be more real than the notebooks themselves.

Leonardo was also left-handed. And a vegetarian. And illegitimate.

The slides that I took of my mother and father still exist, presumably.

Presumably old slides of Simon still exist, too.

I suspect there is something ironical in my knowing so many things about Leonardo and yet not knowing if the slides that I took of my mother and father, or any of my little boy, still exist.

Or, if they exist, where.

Time out of mind.

I have snapshots of Simon, of course. For some time one of them was in a frame on the table beside my bed.

But quite suddenly I do not feel like typing any more of this, for now.

I have not been typing, for perhaps three hours.

All I had anticipated doing, actually, was going to the spring for water. But after I had filled the pitcher I decided to take a walk into the town.