What remains to be reported about my having decided to write no more fiction? A hasty reader of the previous pages may still be waiting to learn why I gave up writing fiction more than fifteen years ago. A more careful reader may already be on the way to learning why I gave up. The hasty reader and the careful reader alike are perhaps curious to know what I happened to be writing on the bustling afternoon when I stopped writing fiction without even having questioned myself as the poet Rilke had recommended. Each sort of reader is welcome to the information that I was writing, on the bustling afternoon, the latest of the hundreds of pages that I had written during the previous four years in an effort to put together a longer and more dense piece of fiction than I had previously put together. The title of the abandoned piece of fiction had occurred to me at some time before I had written the first words of the piece, just as every other title of every other work of fiction of mine had occurred to me.
