Beside my work-couch is a glass-topped table twenty inches tall and eighteen inches square. On it are collected books I’m purportedly reading, currently thirty-two in three stacks, which is too many for either convenience or practicality. Locating a title in this heap wastes time and any day now a bump might topple the stacks into a mess.

You might think from this plethora I’m a voracious reader. Alas no. My reading rate’s testitudinal. My eyes, in the old phrase, are bigger than my stomach. And for the six to eight hours I recline here on a good day (on a really good day, ten), if not snoozing, I either write or read, so mostly I write, either for pleasure, or to tamp confusion, or to satisfy this mystical conviction I am doing my appointed (if not anointed!) “work.” To believe I was dispatched to earth to spout superfluous verbiage is pompous poppycock, I remind myself, yet Reason is no match for Superstition. Writing I feel I’m doing what I was born to – and must not dawdle – for I started late and time is short. I read to write. The words in these teetering stacks are my tutors, monitors, mentors, pals, scolds, inspiration and consolation. Whatever my sickness, these scribblers likely had it too.

Needless to say, one cannot read thirty-two books simultaneously, unless you’re Harold Bloom or some comparable polymath (few were comparable – Dr. Johnson – then who? Both Bloom and Dr. J stand sentinel). These stacks have risen like stalagmites, drip by drip, over the course of a year or so. Almost all I mean to get back to or feel I need within reach. I seldom finish books. I enjoy them a while, then my frisky curiosity scampers elsewhere, or my finicky appetite craves a new tang. My thirty-two books have at least thirty-two bookmarks sprouting out of them (I use scraps, old calling cards, or decommissioned playing cards).

I inventory my inadvertent creation. Three volumes of short stories – by Hemingway, John Cheever, and Updike’s selection of the last century’s “best.” The advantage of short stories is you get a full dose of an author’s personality in a few pages and they’re not too taxing to read, unlike novels, which devour hours, or poems, which may wrack the brain. I spy three novels – by James Baldwin, Fielding, and Hawthorne – eying me as ruefully as dog Henry if left at home. No, you’re not to blame, I apologize, it is I – and my years (73) – and the blasted clock!

There are lots of poems – by William Carlos Williams (three volumes), Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson (natch), Catullus (in translation), Auden, plus hefty anthologies (by Bloom and Louis Untermeyer), and a gleaming slim volume by a dear friend I’m just catching up with, plus thousands of poems a step away (including my bandaged one-volume Shakespeare). Increasingly, poems sustain me as I near my terminus. Their compaction, intensity, impossible aspiration, and occasional giddy thrill prod me to strive harder for higher heights.

Writers’ letters and essays deepen our acquaintance and permit browsing. (An essay is a letter “to whom it may concern.”) Currently I’m visiting with Flaubert (what a monster!), Hazlitt, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Erasmus. Four of the volumes are by me – my current journal, poem attempts (reliably failures), my Collected Words (I forget what I’ve said), and a volume for unliterary jottings (to do lists, memos, and the like). Then compilations – an ever-present quote book – fire-starters for my wooden brain – a Roman Reader, which I keep meaning to get to, and some gooey dog stories, which I ordered before Henry arrived.