With my gloved hands and agile fingers that barely brushed the spines they ran over more quickly than my own eyes, like a pianist playing a glissando, I too always found what I was looking for, to the point where I often had the feeling that it was the books themselves that looked for and found me.
... the person closest to him for some years, with whom he maintained what used to be called (especially in French) a loving friendship, in which there was neither progress nor withdrawal, neither exclusivity nor constancy.
But then there's always got to be a first day for their disappearances.
Knowing that some time one will have to give up everything, whatever that everything is, that's what's unbearable, for everyone, it's all we've ever known, all we've ever been used to. I can understand someone who regrets dying simply because they won't be able to read their favourite author's next book, or see a new film starring an actress they admire, or drink another glass of beer, or do today's crossword, or continue to follow a particular television series, or because they won't know who won this year's FA Cup.
Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partly responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say. Each thing must be told to someone - though not necessarily always to the same person - and each thing will undergo a selection process, the way someone out shopping one afternoon might scrutinise, set aside and assess presents for the season to come. Everything must be told at least once although, as Rylands had determined, with all the weight of literary authority behind him, it must be told when the time is right or, which comes to the same thing, at the right moment, and sometimes, if you fail to recognise that right moment or deliberately let is pass, there will never again be another. That moment presents itself sometimes (usually) in an immediate unequivocal and urgent manner, but equally often, as is the case with the greatest secrets, it presents itself only dimly and only after decades have passed. But no secret can or should be kept from everybody for ever; once in its life, once in the lifetime of that secret, it is obliged to find at least one recipient.
That's why some people reappear in our lives.