When I said that Guy de Maupassant ate his lunch every day at the Eiffel Tower, so that he did not have to look at it, I meant that it was the Eiffel Tower he did not wish to look at, naturally, and not his lunch.

One's language being frequently imprecise in such ways, I have discovered.

Although I have a rowboat of my own, as it happens.

Now and again, I row out a good distance.

Beyond the breakers, the currents will do most of the work.

The row back can be difficult, however, if one allows one's self to be carried too far.

Actually, the rowboat is my second rowboat.

The first rowboat disappeared.

Doubtless I had not beached it securely enough. One morning, or possibly one afternoon, it was simply gone.

Some days afterward I walked along the beach farther than I had ever walked before, but it had not come ashore.

It would scarcely be the only boat adrift, of course, if it is still adrift.

Well, like that ketch in the Aegean, for starters.

Sometimes I like to believe it has been carried all of the way across the ocean by now, however. As far as to the Canary Islands, say, or to Cádiz, on the coast of Spain.

Well, or who is to argue that it might not have gotten to Scyros itself, even?

I do not remember the name of the street with all of those taverns in it.

Possibly I never knew the names of any of the streets in Athens in either case, not speaking one word of Greek.

When I say not speaking one word, I mean not reading one either, obviously.

One would certainly wish to conceive of the Greeks as having been imaginative in that regard, however.

Penelope Avenue being an agreeable possibility, for instance. Or Cassandra Street.

At least there must have been an Aristotle Boulevard, surely. Or a Herodotus Square.

Why did I imply that it was Phidias who built the Parthenon when it was somebody named Ictinus?

In spite of frequently underlining sentences in books that had not been assigned, I did well in college, actually.

So that one could even generally identify the floor plans of such structures, on final exams.

But so what poem am I now thinking about, then, about singing birds sweet, being sold in the shops for the people to eat?

Being sold in the shops, does it go, on Stupidity Street?

I do not believe I have ever mentioned Cassandra in any of these pages before, come to think about it. Let me name the street with the taverns in it Cassandra Street.

Cassandra certainly being an appropriate name for a street in which I believed I saw somebody at a window in either case.

Well, and especially lurking at it.

Or is it simply the notion of somebody lurking at my window in the painting that has made me make this connection?

Still, lurking at such a window is exactly where one is apt to visualize Cassandra after Agamemnon had brought her back as one of his spoils from Troy, as a matter of fact.

Even while Clytemnestra is saying hello to Agamemnon and suggesting a nice hot bath, one is apt to visualize her that way.

Well, but with Cassandra also always able to see things, of course. So that even without a window to lurk at, she would have soon known about those swords near the tub.

Not that anybody ever learned to pay any attention to a word Cassandra ever said, however.

Well, those mad trances of hers.

Nor would there have been a street in Athens named for her after all, obviously. Any more than there would have been one named for Hector, or for Paris.

Then again it is not impossible that people's sentiments might change, after so many years.

At the intersection of Cassandra Street and El Greco Road, at four o'clock in the afternoon, I saw somebody at a window, lurking.

There was nobody at the window, which was a window in a shop selling artists' supplies.

It was a small stretched canvas, coated with gesso, that had highlighted my own reflection as I passed.

Still, how I nearly felt. In the midst of all that looking.

Though as a matter of fact where I saw my own reflection may well have been in a bookstore window.

At any rate the two stores were adjacent. The one with the books was the one that I chose to let myself into.

All of the books in the store were in Greek, naturally.

Possibly some few of them were actually books that I had even read, in English, although naturally I would have had no way of knowing which ones.

Possibly one of them was even a Greek edition of William Shakespeare's plays. By a translator who had been under the influence of Euripides.

Gesso has such a silly look, for a word, when one types it.

It would have helped to prevent my canvases from warping if I had not shot holes into those skylights, obviously.

Had the smoke backed up, winters there at the Metropolitan would have been difficult, however.

Actually one can be saddened, letting one's self into a store full of books and not being able to recognize a single one.

The bookstore on the street below the Acropolis saddened me.

Although I have now made a categorical decision that the painting is not a painting of this house.

Assuredly, it is a painting of the other house, farther down the beach, which burned.

To tell the truth I cannot call that other house to mind at all, any longer.

Although perhaps that house and this house were identical. Or quite similar, at any rate.

Houses along a beach are often that way, being constructed by people with basically similar tastes.

Though as a matter of fact I cannot be absolutely certain that the painting is on the wall beside me any longer itself, since I am no longer looking at it.

Quite possibly I put it back into the room with the atlas and the life of Brahms. I have a distinct suspicion that it had entered my mind to do that.

The painting is on the wall.

And at least we have verified that it was not the life of Brahms that I set fire to the pages from also, out on the beach.

Unless as I have suggested somebody in this house had owned two lives of Brahms, both printed on cheap paper and both ruined by dampness.

Or two people had owned them, which is perhaps more likely.

Perhaps two people who were not particularly friendly with each other, in fact. Though both of whom were interested in Brahms.

Perhaps one of those was the painter. Well, and the other the person in the window, why not?

Perhaps the painter, being a landscape painter, did not wish to paint the other person at all, actually. But perhaps the other person insisted upon looking out of the window while the painter was at work.

Very possibly this could have been what made them angry with each other to begin with.

If the painter had closed her eyes, or had simply refused to look, would the other person have still been at the window?

One might as well ask if the house itself would have been there.

And why have I troubled to close my own eyes again?

I am still feeling the typewriter, naturally. And hearing the keys.

Also I can feel the seat of this chair, through my underpants.

Doing this out at the dunes, the painter would have felt the breeze. And a sense of the sunshine.

Well, and she would have heard the surf.

Yesterday, when I was hearing Kirsten Flagstad singing The Alto Rhapsody, what exactly was I hearing?

Winters, when the snow covers everything, leaving only that strange calligraphy of the spines of the trees, it is a little like closing one's eyes.

Certainly reality is altered.

One morning you awaken, and all color has ceased to exist.

Everything that one is able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of plaster and glue.

I have said that.

Still, it is almost as if one might paint the entire world, and in any manner one wished.