Just a day or so back I was mildly bragging about how little tempted I was in Rome & Amsterdam by what was on offer in shops. It was just after recording this that I found myself in a small bookshop in the Dutch capital, exclusively selling books in English, gazing at a copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake and gravely wishing to possess the tome. The slightly incongruous thing was that the famously unreadable text was published as part of the Wordsworth Classics series and finely so - on good quality paper with what looked like a genuinely informative introduction. Since I've already got a copy of the Faber edition it would have been the height of folly to buy yet another hardcopy version, but it was so satisfying holding the book that I was strongly tempted to do so. Indeed, it occurred to me that it might be quite a wheeze to make a gift of it to Boon since he seriously thinks the text at least partly responsible for my breakdown last August. It seems that ranting about JJ's off-beat masterpiece was somewhat characteristic of the early stages of my Delirium and whenever I refer to it Boon looks more than a little distressed - but since that distress is well-meant I decided not to go through with my off-colour notion of a joke.
And then at Schiphol Airport I again found myself more than a little inclined to buy copies of books I already own, including a very nice edition of W.B. Yeats' Collected Poems and Melville's Moby Dick. Again I manfully resisted the impulse on the grounds of its utter pointlessness. And this time I made a mental note to avoid frequenting any bookshops anywhere for the next year and a half or so.
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