......................................................................................................................................................... Around midnight, I awoke from an old dream— I am living in a basement room. Someone, or some thing, is pounding on the door trying to break in. I yell for it to stop, but it continues until the door is smashed apart. What came through is that in the myth in which Jacob is wrestling the Angel we all fight the indiscernible shadow of ourselves, and this contest will continue to unfold. The fan was humming with warm summer air. I turned on the light and began to read again Thomas Merton’s 1968 notebook, Woods Shore Desert. The focused energy of Merton's vision always strikes fresh Promethean sparks in me. Then I thought of the Olympic torch, an "eternal flame" carried by athletes from Greece to the current Olympic stadium, and how much more important is it for artists to pass the torch of creativity, the "fire in the mind," to the next generation. A few days ago, I had coffee with the distinguished literary translator, Stephen Mitchell. We hadn’t talked since the mid-1970s, when we both lived at the Cambridge Zen Center. He told me how one day, facing his Zen teacher after many years of meditation, "the whole room suddenly filled with light." Besides Merton, I am reading an interview with W.G. Sebald. The characters in some of his novels are Jews who survived the Holocaust . Sebald is not a Jew. In fact, his father had served in Hitler’s army. He said, "My father is still alive...it's the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down." Indeed, it's the sane who always suffer the most. Before returning to sleep, I thought, "Wretched...and filled with light." ......................................................................................................................................................... My father: The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York, 2007.