[1] Whenever he enters a new city, his roving eye keeps a running record of its libraries and its bookstores - their location and their hours. He makes it a point to spend an hour or so in the great buildings that are the libraries of such cosmopoli even if his visit is brief. Wasn't it Borges who spoke for him in a line that said, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library"?

Take for example, the blissful nap he took in the jewel like, and strangely empty, atrium on the top floor of the Chicago Public Library, his head resting on the thick Oxford A.K. Ramanujan he had picked from the stacks or the delightful morning he spent in a nook of the New York Public Library, reading about Persian heroes and villains in an illustrated version of Ferdowsi's "Shahnameh" or the noon he spent in "The Library of Congress in Washington DC gazing at sepia photographs from the WPA Project, circa the Great American Depression. He even knows the place he would definitely spend time in when he enters another city, such as the British Library in London. In idle reveries, he also wonders if he is oddly weird for thinking how wonderful it would be to propose to someone in the stacks of a great library instead of, say, on a Parisian quay along the River Seine at sunset? Marrying, obviously to him, would entail the marriage of libraries as well.

[2] He shouldn't be here; he knows that. But then it is not his fault if booksellers in this city desire to sell books until midnight. He merely is here, taking a break from the rainy-wet snow that had begun to fall outside. Now what harm can there be in browsing for a bit really?

Let's begin with this central rack. O, how lovely are these Vintage series of books on writers; perfect even for time pressed readers like him. Here is Vintage Naipaul, Vintage Atwood, Vintage Langston Hughes, Vintage Joan Didion. Pick them up; furtively paw the insides and the covers; put them back reluctantly.

But then o, in Vintage Barry Lopez, this first paragraph of an essay titled "Flight" is beautiful. And since it becomes evident that Lopez is writing about the mechanics of air cargo, he is justified in buying this book for professional reasons even if these are literary essays devoid of any reference to the traveling salesman problem. Since one book is already in hand, there can't be much harm, is there, in venturing deeper into the store? Besides the moratorium, the cure doesn't involve a ban on snorting poetry.

Ah! William Carlos Williams's "Selected Poems" - of course he can be read in the many excellent anthologies sitting unread on the shelves but, but wasn't Carlos Williams the poet who taught him to eat the saved plums just because they were "so sweet and so cold". Ok, now he has two too many on hand. Time to exit the store. Time to go home and beg forgiveness for these transgressions on the bended knee - if only space can be made to kneel among boxes of books in the first place.

But wait, what is that thick luscious red book? O, Cervantes with his most excellent gentleman Don Quixote. Did he ever read these adventures in full? Non! Now how can he even think of even writing a novel without reading this, this mother and father of all modern novels? But, but, Senor Addict, you have already crossed your holy limit for the night. Who are you, you giant monster, even if to a part of my eye you suspiciously look like a windmill?

He rushes to the cash register waving these three books in circles above his head, and then out of the closing doors into a street polished with snow

to be a novelist? Si? Ja? Oui?

Ha of course you want be! Then go right away get a facial or plastic surgery or something that will make you look hot, for as Kate Kellaway writes in the Guardian Review:

"Certainly, the idea of a novel quietly selling itself now, with no sense of the writer behind it, is far-fetched. Kate Saunders, one of the judges of this year's Orange Prize for fiction (the longlist, just announced, has half-a-dozen first novels on it), says: 'It is harder for first novelists to get noticed now. They will find, increasingly, that they are judged alongside their work - and are less likely to be taken on if they are not photogenic or newsworthy.'

Amid the pile of first novels in front of me, a handful of author photos proves her point: Ivo Stourton looks as if he has stepped out of Brideshead Revisited, snapped outside a sunny villa. His publisher makes much of his youth and Cambridge education. And an A4-sized photograph of a smiling Priya Basil slips invitingly out of the review copy of her novel as if to win favour.

Re-reading Canto IV of Dante's Inferno, he encounters a few former denizens of the Orient such as the philosophers Averroes and Avecinna, who by the virtue of their achievements in the field of human reason were granted a place in the citadel that stands in the first circle of Hell aka the Limbo. Being heathen and the unsaved, Heaven was, of course, out of question for these classical "others". Somewhat mitigating such "orientalistic" readings that may come up in his mind, John Cicardi, the translator, clarifies Dante's intentions by writing this in his endnotes:

"In other words, these shades represent the condition of the spirit that lacks faith; the failure of such a spirit is the failure to imagine better."

It is "the Saladin", however, whom Dante mentions in passing, almost as an afterthought towards the end of the Canto ("and, by himself apart, the Saladin."), who always makes him pause for a long moment as a shiver of recognized loneliness traverses the length of his body. And, by himself apart, the Saladin.