2:22 am

It's late, and I'm spent. And yet I cannot sleep. I seek recluse, as I often do these days, in that book that fell into my life by accident (does anything ever happen by accident?) and has been my bedside companion ever since: Joe Bolton's exalted "The Last Nostalgia". I read it with the pain of knowing that Bolton won't write another (since he took his own life at the age of 28 soon after finishing it). I read it with the fear of finishing it, like the work of Dalida that I dread to know entirely because I am aware of its finiteness and its finality. I wrote in my review of it on Amazon that it would be the one book I'd take to a deserted island--and it's only because I can't commit all of it to memory. Now I understand people who want to commit the Quran to memory: to love a book so much, to find its construction so perfect as to want to make it a part of your self. I turn every page in awe and in anticipation of that voracious humanity, that attuneness to life that proved to be overwhelming. I jump over the words hoping to find in them that which would still that little void perched right above the lungs, at the base of the throat, croaking at the end of the night, longing to be whole..