We bought some land, designed a villa, had it built, and spent the summers of the late seventies and earliest eighties there. Margaret died from a heart attack in 1983. It was the first Saturday in June, the day we were to have left for Ibiza. I had what few of us get, three months with nothing to do but mourn, nowhere to hide from it and nothing to distract from it. At the end of the summer I put our villa on Ibiza up for sale and went wind-surfing with my oldest nephew off Wexford in the Irish Sea.
Raw terror is excellent therapy.
I knew that late May, early June, and no Ibiza would make the summer of 1984 an intense reminder of 1983. And I still had not done any work that required high originality or sustained creativity. George disliked the subtitle so I slipped it into the Prologue, kept its rhythm, but replaced it with Shadows on the Contours of Canon . All necessary materials were on hand from In Fragments and the book was written in June and July of 1984. It was transmitted electronically from DePaul's microcomputer to Polebridge Press and the page proofs were back by August when I returned after some more raw terror on the Irish Sea.