Day of setting up, reacquainting myself with this part of the city, remembering that is was possible to work and think here. If you try to make these jumps without care for that sort of thing, it's five days before you can read, a week before you can think, and a week and a half, if not a fortnight before it's possible to write. The dog doesn't bark, and the caravan moves on.
Part of looking to the types of folks who were displaced during the second world war (Adorno, Benjamin, Mann et al.) is creating a mimetic model of a person who does something more than survive the journey.
Le Carre told the story of going backstage to meet Thomas Mann after one of his unsuccessful lectures on the latter's return to Germany. The writer, standing there in his suspenders and collared dress shirt. The young student Cornwall asked to shake his hand, and did, and remembered it. The reason we make statues is that we can then think about ourselves as being in the company of such folks, not just staring up at the plinth. Becoming like them, to a certain degree. It allows us to place ourselves in the contexts of ideas and experiences that we would otherwise consider completely alien to us. Imitation is a door, not a way of life, but it is a good door.