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WAS A DAY OF COLD SUNLIGHT , the day on which, six years before, his parents had died. He sat at his desk. His two draftsmen were at work, the flats of their tables before them. The room was silent, that was what set him thinking; it was suddenly calm. His father and mother were lying beneath the earth, brown as the relics of saints, their funeral clothes rotting. He was thirty-two, alone in the world. Dreams and work.
    Have I said he was a man of minor talent? He was born after one war and before another—in 1928, in fact, a year of crisis, a year on the path of the century. He was born in disregard of the times, like everyone; the hospital is there no longer, the doctor retired, gone south.
    He believed in greatness. He believed in it as if it were a virtue, as if it could be his own. He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be discovered, that would rise one day to the light. He was clear-eyed and exact about the value of other people’s work. Toward his own he maintained a mild respect. In his faith, at the heart of his illusions, was the structure that would appear in photographs of his time, the famous building he had created and that nothing—no criticism, no envy, not even demolition—could alter.
    He spoke of it to no one, of course, except Nedra. It grew more and more invisible year by year. It vanished from his conversation, though not from his life. It would be there always, until the last, like a great ship rotting in the ways.
    He was well-liked. He would have preferred being hated. I am too mild, he said.
    “It’s your way,” Nedra told him, “you must use it.”
    He respected her ideas. Yes, he thought, I must go on. I must make one building, even if it’s small, that everyone will notice. Then a bigger one. I must ascend by steps.
    A perfect day begins in death, in the semblance of death, in deep surrender. The body is soft, the soul has gone forth, all strength, even breath. There is no power for good or evil, the luminous surface of another world is near, enfolding, the branches of the trees tremble outside. Morning, he wakes slowly, as if touched by sun across the legs. He is alone. There is the smell of coffee. The tan coat of his dog drinks the burning light.
    For the day to unfold it must in its blueness, its immensity hide the conspiracy he lived on, hide but enclose it, invisible, like stars in the daytime sky.
    He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope? Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming. He had nothing. He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands. And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge. The Sagrada Familia was as familiar to him as a barn to a farmer, the “new towns” of France and England, cathedrals, voussoirs, cornices, quoins. He knew the life of Alberti, of Christopher Wren. He knew that Sullivan was the son of a dancing master, Breuer a doctor in Hungary. But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
    There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams  … one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the