A work about reading a certain book wherein the content is described in the most sketchy way-leaving enough hankering after more that could lead to fifty other books. For example: an event (death) is described in the sketchiest of terms. "The past was lopped off in the early chapters." This reading takes place also in the faintest, the most ambiguous of surroundings. For example, this one smells like a bookstore- it's almost grotesque. This enormous array of words and ideas-what made him think he could find it in here...It might have been something like that.

This would seem to be a kind of continual going to and fro between some abstractly represented pillars-a typically ancient setting with green flowing robes and endless colonnades...

Reserve a good bit of time to reread the original ms...

The evening seemed as inviting, just with the book and smokes and plenty of coffee...Maybe a record or two...after a long day of looking for books...

If it is so easy for a book to fall into corrupt hands, for its secrets to be miunderstood...and all in bits and pieces...

And it is so pleasant to rush through a book, to feel the pages quickly turning...low rustles ringing out in the reading room of the 42cd Street Library...And best of all, it so easily conquers time...

I must have been 5 or 6 when I started to read. I fell in love with books and this has never ended. Oh, there have been shabby times...months of reading Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf in Rapallo in 1968...I was dying to go to Paris...that was something else...but books saved me then and I suspect they will save me again-for instance-tomorrow-when, in the morning at the office-I'll sneak out a book (I wonder if it is true about Wallace Stevens' open drawer in his desk...he denied that he wrote there...but still..)
(5/22/87)