Personal dictation

— Alistair Wren. Personal dictation, not for the departmental file.

— I have stopped keeping the notes. I want that on a tape somewhere in my own voice, because a man who stops keeping notes generally means to say afterwards that he never kept them.

— The reason is not the one that will be assumed. The notes were accurate. They were accurate on the day I made them and they are accurate now. What I could no longer establish was the interval between those two conditions, and a scholar who cannot establish an interval has no business publishing.

— I record the following without inference, in the order in which I noticed it. The correspondences persist. The sequence as copied has not altered. My account of it has altered four times, each time in the direction of greater tidiness, and each time in my own hand, on my own paper, in ink I bought myself.

— I am not distressed. I want that on the tape as well. People will want me to have been distressed.

— Wren believed the text described a place. I find I have written that sentence down twice this year, about myself, in the third person, and I do not know from whom I copied it.

— That is all. I shall put this with the others.