Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, Steven Moore

remember that I used to empty bottled water into the tank, so as to still be able to flush.
    Any number of habits died hard, that way. For some period I continued carrying my driver's license and other identification, similarly.
    Naturally I will have stopped taking the path to the beach once it has become genuinely snowy here, on the other hand.
    Which is to say that I sometimes still do make use of a bathroom after all, even if in this case it is by having taken up a board from the bathroom floor.
    Perhaps I have not mentioned having taken up a board from the bathroom floor.
    I have taken up a board from the bathroom floor.
    In a manner of speaking, doubtless it might be said that I am dismantling this house, too.
    Although I have scarcely burned that particular board, which is in fact normally back in the identical place from which I have taken it.
    As often as it has appeared necessary, I have shoveled away part of the embankment just outside.
    Doubtless I had established some sort of similar hygienic arrangement in the house that I burned to the ground on the night that my rowboat disappeared, as well.
    In fact my rowboat did not disappear on the night that I burned that house to the ground.
    It was on that night that I happened to become aware of the rowboat's disappearance, which is something else altogether.
    Very possibly the rowboat had already been gone for days, since I had scarcely yet taken to looking out for it as I do now.
    I will not trouble to point out again how one's language is frequently imprecise in such ways.
    One morning I was similarly convinced that all seventeen of my watches had disappeared too, now that I think about it.
    What happened was that I woke up in a car beside the Pont Neuf, in Paris, and understood that I had not heard the alarms.
    Why have I been awakened by the sun coming in through my windshield, I wondered, instead of by my seventeen simultaneous buzzings?
    It was some moments before I remembered that I had divested myself of the watches on a different bridge altogether, some while before, I believe in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
    Although I find it interesting that I can almost always make a distinction between periods when I was mad and periods when I was not, when one comes down to it.
    Such as when I read certain books out loud, as I did with Aeschylus and Euripides when I was living in the Louvre, which was always a conclusive sign.
    The Louvre is practically right beside the Pont Neuf, by the way.
    The reverse of that statement being equally true, obviously.
    In either case doubtless I was not yet living in the Louvre on the morning when I woke up in the car practically right beside it.
    Surely I would have had no reason to sleep in a car if I had already taken to burning artifacts and picture frames in the museum itself, which I unquestionably eventually did.
    Well, such as the frame from La Gioconda by Leonardo, for instance, from which the old varnish gave the smoke an astringent odor.
    Although the sun actually woke me in cars far more times than that once, to tell the truth.
    Frequently I watched the sun setting from cars, as well.
    The latter was especially true in Russia, of course, where I kept on driving into the west for day after day after day.
    Almost every one of the books I read about ancient Troy wasa book that I read out loud, come to think about it.
    For some reason, a part I always liked was Odysseus pretending he was mad himself, so that they would not make him go to fight.
    How he pretended this was by sowing salt into the ground, while he was plowing.
    Somebody very shrewdly put Odysseus's little boy into one of the furrows, however, and naturally he did not plow his little boy.
    Tiepolo painted this also, I believe. The Madness of Ulysses, being what he called it.
    In fact I am quite certain that the painting is in the same museum with The Rape of Helen, even if I cannot remember which museum that is.
    Possibly I should point out that Odysseus and Ulysses