No. 184. Pineapple Poll. It was the biggest painting he'd ever made. He was going to leave it with just the architecturally-scaled pineapple holding sway, but then he decided to decorate and therefore animate the picture's corners. Whereupon the corners became the whole painting for him.

No. 183. Ideas. Well, the fact is, he had too many of them. They silted themselves into shoals of indigestible possibility. They coagulated into a bristling reef of notes-to-himself, a reef upon which he was more likely to run aground than to sail into some exotic port of achievement. His ideas were making him old. They came to him now as taunts rather than escape hatches or--as they used to be--intimations of mastery..

No. 182. The Artist's Brain. He had told Abigail--his next-door landscape painter--that he had painted a self-portrait. She was anxious to see it, and hurried into his studio directly upon finishing up a particularly bothersome spruce tree in her current painting. What she found perplexed her. There, propped on his easel, was a very large and, she thought, very dissolute painting, mostly in hot pinks, violets and fleshy oranges, a seething mass of heaving, breathing colour upon which, she found to her dismay, he had scribbled a title: The Artist's Brain. It didn't look like a brain to her. It looked more like the striving chrysalis of some huge moth or butterfly about to be born. She was glad he wasn't there. She didn't want to discuss it with him.