Yesterday I had vertigo for the better part of the day. What set my world in motion is still not clear: too little sleep, too much booze the night before, dehydration, antihistamines, chocolate, a migraine, the inner ear. The first few bars of Thelonious Monk’s ‘Four in One’ looped in my head, a spinning, dizzying syntax.

I had planned to bring a tall ladder to the garden and prune the lilacs — which have already bloomed and gone. Negotiating the staircase proved hard enough. So, instead, I kneeled and, when I could not kneel, sat in the dirt and listlessly pulled a few weeds.

A copper-headed scarab grub made his way, with difficulty, out of a rotted tree stump and into the daylight. He writhed and pushed and lurched his fat body forward, but his legs twitched, as if in a palsy, unable to gain traction. As I left him, he had started to burrow back into the moist darkness of the decayed stump.

In the evening, when I was again able to focus my eyes, I went back to my book, and read about Archimedes, who ran naked and dripping wet through the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka! He had, he explained, discovered the force that kept him afloat in the bathtub.