To stay awake (this after few nights of hard drinking and insubstantial sleep), in the airport last night, I read sections (roughly the first fifty pages) of the following novels:

Elizabeth McCracken’s “The Giant’s House”, which was billed as a love story of two misfits, a librarian in a dead end town and the world’s tallest man. But I was soon bored.

Chang-rae Lee’s “Aloft” – a sly humorous look at American ennui, from the cockpit of a small plane.

John Banville’s “The Sea” – this book won the Booker Prize last year, and had magnificat writing. I am buying this today at my cheap-ass book dive

...

Returning to my books last night, after a gap of three weeks, made me feel happy. It also made me feel like the "you" in the Vikram Seth’s poem, "All you who sleep tonight":

"All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones (books) you love"

If this is lame, so be it. Human beings (I include myself) can be limited, while a library on the other hand can be, to borrow from J.L. Borges, infinite.

[1] Notes While Staring Into The Middle Distance

Stuck in an airport as darkness falls, he plays the soundtrack of the movie "Lost In Translation" on auto-loop to ease the ennui that comes from being an unmoored stranger in a vestibule of a place.

Not to think would be preferable under such circumstances but that won't work. Thoughts like other strangers milling around and about the table where he sits flit in and out, from under their subterranean rocks like fish, with puckered mouths.

Writing this has reduced some of that mental noise even if it has not solved the schizophrenia that makes him refer to himself in third person. Hopefully reading (more precisely, re-reading) his fresh smelling paperback edition of Camus's "The Stranger" will solve that mental problem.

[2] Notes While Reading The New York Times

[a] Herr Jesu approaches Matthew Jr in an airport where he sits cranking out financial valuations for Caesar (currently referred to as the Man), and is rudely rebuffed (unlike Matthew Sr) for it is hard to calculate the ROIC* of Heaven.

[b] Greetings and partings, exits and entrances embraces and silences, such is the steak of our hours.

[c] "Death is the mother of beauty" - Wallace Stevens

A dozen Icaruses are born here every year.

He walks back and forth on the bridge weeping, each step a debate, as the air, washed clear of the morning fog, blows into his face.

A woman stops him, and because of the painful transparency of his tears instead of an embrace, merely demands that he take her photograph just five minutes before he leaps, and six minutes before he is claimed by the Pacific swells.

* ROIC: Return on Invested Capital; pronounced as "roik"