I’ve begin a new job. Well, actually it’s an old job that I’ve returned to – an old editorial job. I used to like certain aspects of this job, but certain aspects crept into it which made it intolerable. I like the publishing industry. I like reviewing manuscripts that authors submit, dealing with authors, preparing publishing contracts, planning publications, and editing texts. There is a tradition in the publishing world which, with a healthy dose of cynicism, nevertheless honors the printed page. It’s populated by a curmudgeonly group of bushy eye-browed men and cat women who enjoy the solitary work of reading and writing. Returning to my old job has been very surreal and unsettling. At a few points I thought I would have to just rise from my chair and leave the building, never to return.

The tall young man sitting in the chair beside me, barefoot, in a sleeveless shirt and vest, orange ball cap, and goatee, is reading “The Dance of Intimacy: A woman’s guide to courageous acts of change in key relationships.”

Just when I thought Proust in the “Fugitive” was getting to be too much for even me—when for a hundred pages he writes from ever conceivable perspective about his dead lover Albertine and about the nature of their relationship without progressing the narrative a single measure, he resuscitates the story and my interest with a new surprise—Gilberte is back. That’s all I’ll say for now. I did read this bit a few days ago, which I liked for no particular reason other than that he links purposeless lives with a passion for minutiae, which I thought was funny, if not always altogether accurate. He’s writing about the Duke and Duchess Guermantes: “With the passion for minutiae of people whose lives are purposeless, they would discern, one after another, in the people with whom they became acquainted, qualities of the simplest kind, exclaiming at them with the artless wonderment of a townsman who on going into the country discovers a blade of grass, or on the contrary magnifying as with a microscope, endlessly commenting upon and inveighing against the slightest defects, and often applying both processes alternately to the same person.” Funny. I can imagine people who are like this.