In my early twenties, I was seduced by the trees and nighttime illumination of the Belgian painter René Magritte, and in Le Seize Septembre I found the best of both. This 1956 painting shows a tree at the last moments of dusk, but the crescent moon shines not from above but from the heart of the tree, casting a strange light onto the surrounding ground.

I will always associate my secondhand Magritte monograph featuring this painting with an old paperback of Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) because I bought them at the same time. Having been raised Catholic, I was ready to shed the dogma but still wanted to have faith in something. Watts—a British Zen Buddhist who gained renown in the San Francisco Bay area in the fifties and sixties—had something of a renaissance in the eighties, and The Wisdom of Insecurity was considered essential reading.

At that time, I thought you needed to know what you believed in order to write fiction. This was also a time when everything seemed to be talking to me. Nearby to my Beacon Hill apartment was an old dry cleaners that always seemed to be closed. Visible inside the glass storefront was an antique coin-op scale—the kind you stand on—promising “Your Wate and Fate.” I felt I had to decide something about how to live but didn’t know what.

I wondered if Watts had it right. I hadn’t studied Eastern religion in college, so his proscription of living in the present was new to me: “The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present.” This misplaced focus of attention meant we were forever miserable, hungering “for the perpetuity of something which never existed.”

Watts attributes the anxiety of the postwar years to the separation of the “I” from the “me,” as we get with the “conscience” in Western religion—and, for that matter, with the further slicing out of id, ego, and superego in Freud. “To be secure means to isolate and fortify the ‘I,’ but it is just the feeling of being an isolated ‘I’ which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.”

If we buy into capitalism’s perennial future, we are sucked into “a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions.”

Watts’s ideas seemed right to me then; they reminded me of John Berger’s discussion of images in contemporary advertising (what he called “publicity”) in Ways of Seeing (1972): “Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be.”

I didn’t ever want to be envious of my future self. I really did want to believe and live in the present. But how could you be a fiction writer and not constantly travel between the past and the future, trying on different perspectives to tell the story that is true? I shared Somerset Maugham’s belief in A Writer’s Notebook (1949)—that the writer is “made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?”

And besides that, what about the anxious and security-seeking people who were depressed, suffered from schizophrenia, had emotional and behavioral problems? This was the time right before Prozac, when the talking cure and Freud were on the outs but there was nothing to fill that void. The Watts way, I decided, was for the strong, not the weak. Despite his rules for living, his alcoholism accelerated his death at age 58.

For all the things Freud had wrong about our neuroses, he famously declared that the goal of psychoanalysis was the transformation of “neurotic misery into common unhappiness.” I remember thinking bleakly that that was about all we could expect out of life, but I still felt we needed faith in something.

Because reading Watts coincided with flipping through pages of Magritte paintings, the titles of the artwork seemed connected to my spiritual questions. By coincidence, I was looking at Le Seize Septembre on the morning of September 16, and I wrote on the back of a bookmark from the Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore: “make this a holiday.”

Eventually I concluded that rather than seeking to change the way I lived, I, like Watts, would always be one of the weak who would not have an answer for life. Years later, a line from psychologist and critic Adam Phillips made this clear to me: “We know almost nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves.”

September 16, or Le Seize Septembre, has been my personal holiday for decades. In New York City, September is full of remembrance. There’s September 11th but also the Jewish holidays. This year, Le Seize Septembre fell between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown today. After so much grayness, it was finally a sunny day in Manhattan. I sat in the sun in one park and then got up and walked to another park where I sat in the shade. What the past teaches is how new and different the present always feels—a complete and utter mystery cloaked in darkness, but with the advantage of a slender crescent of waxing moon placed to guide you, just so. §