1989

January, spends ten days in Guadeloupe with Sigrid.

February, buys a video camcorder. Records domestic activities in Amagansett, meals with friends; also experiments with extreme close-up self-portraiture.

March, spends a week at the clinic in Überlingen for his regular weight-loss and exercise regimen.

April 15, writes to Buzzi that his childhood neighborhood in Bucharest was razed by Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, ending his plans for a visit. “So my plan to unburden myself of the past has already been resolved, in a drastic manner, and I have no desire to visit the imbecilic future.”

June 4, receives honorary doctorate from Yale University, along with Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Hawking, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Late June, the cat Papoose, for 15 years a beloved companion of ST and Sigrid, disappears and presumably dies. Later tells Sterne that of all the friends he has outlived, he misses his sister and Papoose most.

December 10-13, in Sarasota, Florida, to consider purchase of a house or apartment.

December, obsessively watches TV news as the regime of Ceausescu is violently overthrown. “I have what they call phantom pain, that is, strong and specific pain in the big toe of a leg amputated years before. It’s the pain of the Romanian patriot I was until the age of 8 or 10, when the anti-Semitism of the place made me renounce that fucking nation forever, remaining faithful only to the landscape, the smell, the house on Strada Palas.”

Now spends more and more time at his country house in Amagansett.