My books (which do not know that I exist) are as much a part of me as this visage, with its grey hair at the temples and grey eyes that look for vanity in glass surfaces and wonderingly run my curved hand over. And not without some logical bitterness it occurs to me that the essential words that most express me are not in my own writings, but in these books that don’t know who I am. Better that way. The voices of the dead will utter me forever.