“Listen to this,” he’d sometimes say, removing his headphones,breaking the oppressive silence of those long sweltering summer mornings.“Just listen to this drivel.” And he’d proceed to read aloud something hecouldn’t believe he had written months earlier.“Does it make any sense to you? Not to me.”“Maybe it did when you wrote it,” I said.He thought for a while as though weighing my words.“That’s the kindest thing anyone’s said to me in months”

A few hourslater, when I remembered that he had just finished writing a book onHeraclitus and that “reading” was probably not an insignificant part of hislife, I realized that I needed to perform some clever backpedaling and lethim know that my real interests lay right alongside his