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“A long the… Along the riverrun”: James Joyce ends Finnegans Wake mid-sentence—“A way a lone a last a loved a long the …”—which loops around to the book's beginning to become: “Along the… riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay… .” And so a great spiral of living emerges. “Along the riverrun,” a sly pun on the French “reverons”: Let us dream. And so let us dream this psychoanalysis—this life—I will now share with you…
Imagine this scene: A New England storm rages. The wind howls; snow piles up. The city shuts down. I see the traffic light from the second floor of my house: nothing is moving. The power out, it's turning dusk. Yet one of my patients hasn't canceled—and neither have I. I have a home office, and I am waiting.
Decades ago—so I was a young man in my thirties, but, as in a dream, it seems right now. I don't quite trust my recollections, because they are cinematic, and somehow I am both in the scene and watching at the same time, impossible except in my synthetic imagination, my reconstruction. Still, I can visualize this hyper-real space.