The fact that I'm writing this represents a failure on my part.
Luckily the particular failure that I mean does not on first blush feel like one of those that sticks with you, haunting you for years, like turning back within reach of the summit on doubts about the weather or your remaining strength, or like finishing four-fifths of the two-pound burger that would have got your Polaroid on the wall of the truck-stop diner.
My failure of this morning was not quite - I was so close - managing to return to sleep after the tritonal wake-up call delivered in Beirut a half-hour ago by the Israeli Air Force. How many bombs were there - eight? Ten?
They began to fall not long after 06:00. The first ones, it occurs to me, the first two, the really big ones, woke up most every resident of the city, minus those who were put to sleep forever.
Walking down the street later, stopping in for coffee - every person I run into, I'll know to the minute when they got up this morning, in all their various unseen beds. Sometime this afternoon we'll get a count on the ones who didn't wake up.
Four weeks of strikes and still for me there's this weak place inside, this place that by now should be hard, which prevents me from rolling over and dozing back off after an outbreak of hits.
On the bright side, I'll probably have another chance at redeeming myself tomorrow morning around this time.
It's a war zone, and certainly at this point there's no room to complain of lost sleep, and there's seemingly diminishing meaning in taking note of each strike, each attack. The purely surprising, somehow awkward early stages of the conflict are past; both sides are up to speed now; both have hit killing stride. How many innocents did Hizbullah murder in the last week, in reply to the innocents Israel murdered, in reply to the innocents Hizbullah murdered?
The death accountants and blood apologists on both sides, too, are now fully engaged, every day on TV getting out their scorecards, history books and slide rules and proving with dates, numbers and names the greater suffering of their particular side, and its consequent moral spotlessness.
What happens when two morally unimpeachable sides square off in a fight to the death? How do you figure out which side God is really on?
What was it that Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, said after the Qana strike that killed dozens of kids last Sunday? "When you sleep with a missile, sometimes you do not wake up in the morning" - something like that. No matter that no reporter, UN observer or anyone else at the scene turned up any trace of weaponry, there having been none. I mean, it's war, it ain't footsie, right?
Actually, without having seen the news, without having gone into the office, I already know what the bombs hit this morning: a Hizbullah stronghold. That's what the English-language news is calling those south Beirut neighborhoods, "stronghold"s. Where the barbarians live, and, when attacked, where they retreat on their horses, swords and dark eyes flashing.
I myself live in a Maronite Christian stronghold in another part of town. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm in charge of helping to boil the oil and Saturdays I'm on catapult duty.
We practice a lot in case the Bush administration has Lebanon down for its Full Democracy package - which of course in its later stages calls for a rousing, all-out civil war - and what's left of Hizbullah comes charging over. Because those guys are notoriously hard to hit, again as the Western news services have so well established: They're "shadowy," phantom-like, these terrorists. Not quite supernatural, but not wholly of this world, either.
A Lebanese acquaintance yesterday called life in East Beirut in the past month "War DeLuxe," meaning that it's a war zone, yes, and every once in a while a strike will come close enough - Achrafieh, the port, the Jounieh bridge - to really get the heart beating. But ultimately, for now, for us, there is no mortal danger and not even any real discomfort.
But then I got on the phone late last night with a former tutor, Rana, who is trapped with her extended family in a house somewhere the Bekaa, that torn-up, mowed-down Hizbullah stronghold in eastern Lebanon. The roads in every direction are impassable, destroyed by bombs.
Before the bombardment began, Rana would come out with we Americans sometimes. One night in June we stayed up late drinking and dancing at White, the brand-new rooftop lounge at the An-Nahar building downtown, which closed within weeks of opening.
Most of her family does not leave the house, ever, she said. Periodically her father goes out and somehow procures food. They spend their time watching the television news. "It's like being in prison," she said.
Rana used to live with her immediate family in a home in the southern suburbs. After the first couple days of strikes they got out of there and headed for the mountains, only to come under fire there, too.
They had fled suddenly, and because the chances seemed good of returning home soon she didn't pack a bag. She brought along only one change of clothes. "I'm so glad no one can see me," she said.
Is your house still there? I asked her. To move back into when that cease-fire happens, when we resume lessons, when things get back to normal. She had no idea.