I left my flatmate watching television in the common room tonight, went to my room and read old poems collected by someone else. My friend JD used to say, repeating Harold Bloom I think, that reading is "the experience of the authentic self." He seemed to be using the phrase, as if it agreed with his long life of reading alone. He was a resolute soldier of listening and reading. He had a wife. He drove a car made before 1980. I never met his wife, but she loomed there outside our conversations: he'd speak of her sometimes, and of their relationship. How curious, isn't it? How is it possible to be alone and not in one lifetime?