be joyful, though you have considered all the facts

When I can’t sleep, I imagine that I’m standing in front of a wall of bookcases, my own personal library, and I run my fingertips along the spines of the books. And I still can’t fall asleep contently imagining the titles I’d always have within reach, I gather the authors and subjects around one huge table: Truman Capote and Gunter Grass, Herman Melville next to C Wright Mills, George Orwell making conversation with Sylvia Plath, Zadie Smith and Dylan Thomas and David Foster Wallace, Franz Kafka and Wendell Berry, Zygmunt Bauman and Tony Judt and Emily Dickinson. I wedge Aldo Leopold in between the Mark Twain and Simone de Beauvoir. I will never have enough time to read everything, or to re-read those books I read too early (Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground) or not often enough.