I keep trying, and manage some workmanlike stuff that doesn't require inspiration, and then I check my phone, check my email, go on Facebook. I read other people's posts, make jaunty comments, flitter away the time, profane the time.

The Christmas trees are brought from Vermont by monosyllabic men in warm clothes; they seem alien, closer to the earth, silently contemptuous, like gypsies. They bring in their trees and stand them up on the pavements, so that swaths of Broadway are suddenly transformed into dark, pine-scented avenues.

Used books,” as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn’t the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There’s no such thing as a used book. Or there’s no such thing as a book if it’s not being used.

I glance back as I am pulling the door shut. I can see Mrs. Kasperek on her bed, in the apartment denuded of the books that were all her life.

These books...," she begins, and stops. I am frightened for her, for myself decades from now, struggling to retain dignity with two strangers as they take away my books. I can see the straight line to her grave, to mine.

Used" is such an odd word, so much stranger than "second-hand." A prefix for condoms, and there's a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those.

I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word.

That thing that Hamlet says - "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so". Not quite true if you are stuck under a grand piano, not quite true for genocide, but surely it must be true about love?

I finish a short afternoon shift that I spent learning about book descriptions with George. It is an arcane system that the Internet is putting paid to, where fair is foul and good is bad and perfect means you are a charlatan. Price-clipped is bad. Second impression is bad. Inscribed is bad, unless it is by the author, and then inscribed is good, but nearly as good as signed. Unless the inscription is to someone patently important—To my dear Laura, love from Petrarch.

Aristotle didn't have a problem with abortion," she says. "Oh, well, good, that's a comfort," I say.