The pitcher is actually a jar. On the way home I forgot about having left it, and so will have to go back out.

This is hardly a chore. And there is a frisky breeze.

In the town, I looked at the boats in the boat basin.

While I was there I also realized that there is an explanation for so many people forgetting that The Last Supper is a painting of a Passover meal, doubtless.

The explanation being that what they really forget is that everybody in the painting is Jewish.

For a long period, in the Borghese Gallery, I stood in front of a pediment carving of Cassandra being raped. Her hair is magnificently wild, for anonymous stone.

Cassandra and Helen, both, had told the Trojans there were Greeks in the wooden horse. Nobody paid attention to either of them, naturally.

Quite possibly I have not mentioned the boat basin before. There are several, nearby.

Very few of the boats would appear to be seaworthy any longer.

Though I rarely have any impulses in that regard any longer, either.

Once, I sailed to Byzantium, however. By which I mean Istanbul.

Though how I actually went, after the Bering Strait, was by various cars across Siberia. Next following the Volga River south, until I turned toward Troy.

Constantinople thus becoming very little out of my way.

Now and again I have regretted that I did not continue on across to Moscow and Leningrad, on the other hand. Especially having never been to the Hermitage.

And to tell the truth I have never done any sailing at all, when one comes down to it.

Every boat I have made use of has had an engine.

This is scarcely including my rowboats, naturally.

Which in either case I have rarely done more in than drift.

Though I did give serious thought to the notion of rowing out beyond the breakers on the night on which my house was burning to the ground, actually, once it had struck me to wonder from how far out the flames might be seen.

Doubtless I would not have rowed nearly far enough, even if I had gone, since one would have surely had to row all the way beyond the horizon itself.

For that matter one might have actually been able to row as far as to where one was out of sight of the flames altogether, and yet still have been seeing the glow against the clouds.

Which is to say that one would have then been seeing the fire upside down, so to speak.

And not even the fire, but only an image of the fire.

Possibly there were no clouds, however.

And in either case I no longer had a rowboat.

Now, each time I go to the beach, I take a look to make certain that the new rowboat is in its place.

In fact I took such a look only moments ago, when I came back from the town.

Perhaps I have not mentioned that I came back from the town by way of the beach, instead of the way I had gone, which was by way of the road.

Which would explain why I did not remember to bring in my pitcher, which I had left at the spring.

Frequently I tend to think of my jar as a pitcher. Doubtless this is only because a pitcher has more of the sound of what one would wish to carry to a spring.

Though perhaps another reason why I did not remember it is that I am feeling somewhat tired.

Actually, I am not feeling tired. How I am feeling is not quite myself.

Well, perhaps what I am more truthfully feeling is a kind of depression. The whole thing is fairly abstract, at this point.

In any case, doubtless I was already feeling this way when I stopped typing. Doubtless my decision to stop typing had much to do with my feeling this way.

I have already forgotten what I had been typing when I began to feel this way.

Obviously, I could look back. Surely that part cannot be very many lines behind the line I am typing at this moment.

On second thought I will not look back. If there was something I was typing that had contributed to my feeling this way, doubtless it would contribute to it all over again.

I do not feel this way often, as a matter of fact.

Generally I feel quite well, considering.

Still, this other can happen.

It will pass. In the meantime there is little that one can do about it.

Anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence, as somebody once said, or unquestionably should have said.

Though to tell the truth I would have believed I had shed most of such feelings, as long ago as when I shed most of my other sort of baggage.

When winter is here, it will be here.

Even if one would appear never to be shed of the baggage in one's head, on the other hand.

Such as the birthdays of people like Pablo Picasso or Dylan Thomas, for instance, which I am convinced that I might still recite if I wished.

Or the name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, even if one still has no idea who she may have been.

I do not know who Marina Tsvetayeva may have been either, although in this case the name at least did not come into my mind until an hour ago, when I was at the boat basin.

Obviously, I was thinking about the other sort of marina.

Actually it was Helen Frankenthaler's name that caught my eye on that poster not far from the Via Vittorio Veneto. I do not remember ever having been in a show with Georgia O'Keeffe.

Though in fact perhaps it was Kierkegaard who said that, about anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence.

If it was not Kierkegaard it was Martin Heidegger.

In either case I suspect there is something ironical in my being able to guess that something was said by Kierkegaard, or by Martin Heidegger, when I am convinced that I have never read a single word written by Kierkegaard or Martin Heidegger.

A good deal of one's baggage would appear to be not even one's own, as I have perhaps elsewhere suggested.

Anna Akhmatova is somebody else whom I have never read, although doubtless she is in some way connected to Marina Tsvetayeva.

Then again it is not impossible that there are books by all of these people in this house.

I have noticed guides to several of the National Parks. As well as one to the birds of the southern Aegean and the Cyclades Islands.

There is an explanation for the atlas generally lying flat, incidentally, instead of standing askew.

The explanation being simply that the atlas is too tall for the shelves.

And in either event I have just now categorically determined where it was that I read the life of Brahms.

Where I read the life of Brahms was in London, in a bookstore near Hampstead Heath, on the morning when I was almost hit by the car.

I believe I have mentioned being almost hit by the car, which came rolling down a hill.

Perhaps I was not almost hit by the car. Still, one moment I was reading the life of Brahms, and a moment after that, whoosh! there went the frightening thing right past me.

Just imagine how this startled me, and how I felt.

Only a day before, I had sat in a vehicle with a right-hand drive and watched a street called Maiden Lane, near Covent Garden, fill up with snow, which must surely be rare.

Naturally the car that came down the hill had a right-hand drive also, this still being London.

My reason for emphasizing this is simply because that same side of the car was the side that was nearest me, and naturally my first reaction was to look for who in heaven's name could be driving.

Naturally nobody was driving.

Still, my condition of being startled continued for quite some time.

Unquestionably it was still continuing while I was realizing that what the car was going to do next was to crash into the car I had been driving myself, and which I had double parked a certain distance farther down the hill.

Instead it crashed into something else altogether.

As a matter of fact it did not crash into anything at all, that I saw, but kept right on down the hill and out of sight.