It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?