Shapes of sunlight hit the wall in front of me: what little of it is visible and not armored with bookcases. The side of an open, white box on the floor in Dennis’s office is edged in light. The books on row four of the first bookcase opposite the bed are the ones getting my attention, thanks to the publicity offered by the sun. How many have I read? Not nearly enough. Many of the Louis DeWohls; Moll Flanders, but not since college, and I hated it then. It seems to me that I loathed every sentence ever created by Daniel Defoe, but could that really be true? I suppose I would need to re-read one of his novels to find out for sure. Time may well be too precious to waste on an endeavor like that, but I’d certainly not say I’d never do it. You never know. The Madonnas of Leningrad, right next to Moll, is much more likely to get a second perusal. It was better than my literary snobbery wanted it to be. I am relieved that that particular form of indoctrination is loosening its grip on my life. Some of the white letters on When You Find My Body are winking in the shaft of light. I bought that one on a whim at my local Barnes & Noble, after it had been promoted on the store’s Instagram page. I wonder what I’ll find when I open its covers. Do I really want to read the farewell note of a woman lost in the woods of Maine and fully aware they she will not make it out alive? I do. It seems to me that stories are the building blocks of a good life, and while fairy tales have an important part to play, constructing a warm, strong shelter generally involves more than just few a two-by-fours. The first book on the shelf, getting the tiniest sliver of light, is a book of essays by Stanley Crouch that Dennis bought years and years ago. I wonder if he read the whole thing. It seems to me that the thoughts therein turned out to be a bit darker than Dennis was expecting, but I might be wrong. Am I confusing that one with Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom, another Dennis purchase, one book over from Crouch? What is that white book between the two? The words on the spine are too small for me to read from back here. Stella and I used to play a game that involved one of us picking a title from the bookcase and saying it as fast and as slurry as possible. The other had to the guess the title. It always involved watching the eyes to find the shelf that the title might be on, but when that didn’t work, we’d resort to straight-up questions and answers: “Which shelf?” “Middle section, second from the top.” Stella could generate more speed or just more plain confusion than I, and she invariably guessed right more often than I did. Oh, the sunlight has moved down to the edge of the shelf itself. Time to get out of bed.
