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saying to one, “This is all I want of you,” to another, “This is all you may have of me,” tasting, in my silent dictatorship, the terms that people would not give. And for this the minor books are best, the ones no one has read for years or will ever read again, for these are the dependent ones who seek most piteously to confide. Seated among them, I lost my servility for the duration of an afternoon. In the tricky light the room’s round shape was a shaft on which I rose, a stylite on his pillar. The colorless ceiling melted before my unfocused eyes and I floated there, apprentice to that folie de grandeur which is most of what really goes on between a book and a man.
    That afternoon I pulled down one book after another and restlessly set them aside, erecting a half-circle of discards around me, finally settling on an old miscellany called The Rose , or Affection’s Gift for 1845 , to which, for its title, I had awarded a certain reciprocal fondness. When, later, I raised my head, it was growing too dark to read.
    They are in Memphis now, I thought, and bent my head again, but in that moment the tiny print had become invisible. Outside, as if on signal, the katydids began their chafing drill, the sound of the minutes scraping by. Pressing my sneakers against the chair rung, I listened, feeling smaller, for all my flight, than I had been before. On the table, strewn around me, the rejected books glimmered, pursing their blind mouths, taking that reprisal the inanimate always can on whatever living thing brushes it by. All the time I had been reading, the other part of me—the owl that sits on all our shoulders—had been waiting for Miss Pridden’s step.
    That (for convenience) owl , one knows of its existence from the beginning, long before one meets up with the Freudian phrasers. It is that thing in us which is neither super nor supra , not ego or tibi or illa , but sits in each of us like a pocket of outer space in which all that is qualifying, human, adjectival, dies. It is what presses the wrist of the whining diarist who thought he swore not to temper the wind to his shorn self, and points his pen a compass degree nearer the skin. Back there in the library, I heard its observing, vacuum voice, telling me, as I stood on tiptoe at one of the windows and peered down into the dark tatters of the street, that I waited for the release of Miss Pridden’s step, not for her company, but because then I too would have someone to leave behind.
    Across the avenue, in the house opposite, a circle of boarders sat at a round dining-room table; at that distance no clatter came from them, and their heads looked as if bowed in benediction under the gaudy lotus-bell of the hanging lamp. Between us, the façade of the house, with its attached smear of cobbles, interposed like a theater scrim; forward on the trough, a cat cleaned itself to some private, arching music, tucked its paws in, and gazed. I knew the house, having more than once delivered a dress to a woman there, and now for company I revisited it in the parts I could not see, climbing the Turkey carpet that ran, a faded hemorrhage, down the stairs, padding along the straw matting of the corridor, to the smell of CN disinfectant and the drip of basins, past each madder-brown door with its card below the transom— Reavis , Fitzwater , Smith , Mason , Dubois … the last of the names eluded me, and then, zinc-sharp out of its shadow, it came to me— Parkes. Miss Pridden, if not returned by now, must be spending the evening with the lady-friend in Charlotte who, I had heard her say with gentle commiseration, lived in such a boardinghouse too. Straining, I pried forward to visit them there, to project my ghost between them at a similar table, but I had never been to the place or heard her describe it, and I could not get past the blank after the main street in Charlotte. I am a revenant, after all; my facility does not stretch too far beyond.
    It was the hour before