In place of friends he now has a wall of books, to which he turns in order to occupy those empty hours when his spirit could be forging itself in the human crucible. Intellectual investigation, then at various points of time, lapses beyond the simple need and curiosity for knowledge into some kind of an activity that will fill his hours before death. And because he doesn’t know how many of these he has been granted, and also because the wall of books seems to grow taller and throw a larger shadow, another kind of darkness, across his face with each passing day, reading lapses from a pleasurable stroll among the bushes of print into some kind of a marathon or an endurance race among open pages, all seemingly on fire.

His bed is littered with open books ?all picked up and begun as a turning away from something that was already opened previously. Is this only thermodynamics at work, an expansion of entropy, of bookish static filling both real and psychic space? He sighs attain a deeper pitch the more he shovels poems, plays, criticism, science writing, political polemics, history, travelogues, magazines down his maw ?does he sometimes see the connection between that feeling of suffocation and the velocity with which he is eating? And then, how many friends does he have? How many real conversations with voices, not those frozen in ink and pulp, but those issued by voice boxes does he have?

Dismal bleakness when he thinks of those latter questions. Best to ignore them and continue with the fetishistic séance, with various characters in attendance: Hamlet, Dionysus, drunk Henry Miller ready for the next orgy, Plath with her Nazi daddy and ancillary gas oven, grandfatherly Narayan wandering about Malgudi - a town he has exiled himself from, brooding Rilke flogging loneliness in Paris as he awaits the angel of Duinio Elegies to descend. These are manageable characters for him to summon and hold onto, steadily, in his brain, in that lobe where such processing occurs.

The rest, i.e., old friends who have become ghosts or are turning into ghosts or whom he is turning into ghosts, lovers who are frozen in the amber of his poems, and then those with whom he is unable to make himself understood, are best kept at abeyance. They are incisors of the god damned black dog which is stalking him, and which he wishes to kill with his bare hands, soft and dandy, and eat raw, sucking out the marrow out its cancerous incandescent bones.