Too Loud a Solitude

My 3 highlights

• And when there was no room for even a single addition, I pushed my twin beds together and rigged a kind of canopy of planks over them, ceiling high, for the two additional tons of books I’ve carried home over the years, and when I fall asleep I’ve got all those books weighing down on me like a two-ton nightmare. Sometimes, when I’m careless enough to turn in my sleep or call out or twitch, I am horrified to hear the books start to slide, because it would take little more than a raised knee or a shout to bring them all down like an avalanche, a cornucopia of rare books, and squash me like a flea.

• I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.

• At about that time I received word that my mother was dying, so I immediately hopped on my bike and rode home, but since I happened to be thirsty, I ran down to the cellar and grabbed a cold earthenware jug of sour milk, picked it up with both hands, and was gulping it down greedily when all at once I saw two eyes floating opposite my own, but I was so thirsty that I went on drinking until the two eyes were as dangerously close as the lights of a locomotive speeding into a tunnel at night, and suddenly the eyes disappeared and my mouth was full of something wrigglingly alive, and I pulled a frog out of it by the leg, and as soon as I had disposed of it in the garden, I went back and polished off the milk à la Leonardo.