The last few days temperatures have been in the high 20s and early 30s. Clear blue skies with streams of cirrus. Mornings and evenings are cooler. Can't remember when it last rained. Right now, a big golden moon, only slightly dented, one night away from full, is rising over the City while in the west the blue fades down to a pale lemon colour that is almost white, with the church steeple standing black against it. I'm very tired. Not physically, mentally. Almost exhausted - I have to make one more effort, or perhaps two, and then I will be at the end of my book. Not book, draft of book, because I can see already how much more there is to do; but at least I will have a whole to do it to or with, a complete thing: even if it's not the wondrous shining shape I thought of making, it has some shape, some kind of reality, it exists ... today, in the afternoon, I was going over the editing notes on Luca Antara, section 3, which has interpolated into it a long account of a voyage which I pretend is real, or at least derived from a real document, but is in fact a fiction. And I remembered how false it seemed to me at the time of writing - perhaps not false so much as implausible, I didn't believe anyone would believe it, without remembering that we don't only read to believe, sometimes we do it to travel, to forget, to dream, to change. So then I wondered if what I'm doing now, which seems just as false, implausible, unbelievable, might in a year's time seem ... I don't know, I'll settle for anything really so long as it is different from this feeling I have now: exhaustion, futility, loss, as if all those long strings of words were just like the streams of cirrus that appear in the sky sometimes and then, next time you look, they're gone. So I look out the window and the sky is green, there's a plane flying west and Orion, who lies on his side at this latitude and is seen by Polynesians as a waka or canoe, is setting sail into the black south land.