When he runs into his shadow at a bookstore suddenly, both recoil in surprise. They haven’t seen each other in months, two isolated men with preoccupations that don’t have any bearing on large swathes of the milieu they find themselves trapped in – in what they do, and in how they live. Reaching for absolution through books seems to have become a strategy they have come to rely on increasingly. Greater their reliance on them – those books, faster the drift of their rafts along the current. And greater the effort it requires of them to reverse course, to do anything differently from the now.

But books, even the wildest of them, are safe neighborhoods to wander it. Surprises, if there are any, are manageable. Yet, doesn’t their unwillingness to be surprised by life (or is it the actual act of living?) inhibit them from their stated ambition to write. Their conversation, as it had often in the past, begins with the books they are both seeking in the middle of a stunning fall afternoon under the glare of fluorescent light. His friend says that he is seeking a treatise on Hume. Why Hume? Oh, to recreate a conversation, or, more precisely an argument, that Hume had with Dr. Johnson. Both names he knows, names that belong to the lists that are haphazardly scrawled on the walls of his brain.

He recalls, and re-sums to his friend, a conversation he had had recently with a philosopher who proceeded to give him a quick hover over the lay of western philosophy. But since other than vacuous generalities he can offer no specifics, he switches talk to fiction. Fiction, not because he now reads it as assiduously as he once did, but fiction because he prefers the fluidity of stories to the abstract angles of locking and unlocking ideas.

He begins talking about a novel that he reluctantly left unbought at an airport kiosk (even though he has now begun to earn a larger salary, he can’t let go of the old habit to buy books remaindered or used instead of at their full retail price), and as he does a memory of that hundred page fast read, squatting on his haunches comes back to him. It was a novel of dying and memory, in which the narrator speaks in first person – the kind of novel he likes but can’t write. His friend replies, yes, he heard about it but he was told that it was a difficult novel, difficult in its writing and in its construction. Difficult? He didn’t even notice. Yes, it had certain words he could only guess at the meaning of but the writing was dense with impressionistic strokes; the kind he had once attempted but only poorly.

After the clutch of novels summarily discussed and pronounced upon, talk turns to (and is concluded by) news of the living breathing world, of people angling through, of stuff such as hopes lost and found by these people (friends, kin, acquaintances etc) who still exercise effort to lose and find, unlike them sitting in a café gazing at the influx of others (it is hard, always hard, to look at resignation clouding the other’s eye). He makes a joke on how their conversations always seem to revolve around books followed by gossip regarding the lives of these others; about how they are becoming shady literary characters in a Borgesian story conjuring bloody knife fights and torrid tangos while reading another scholarly treatise on, say, Dante.