mining my own book collection

Yesterday I looked through all the books I left at my brother's place in Chicago when I moved to England. It was nice to find so many books that I didn't know I had but I had been looking for in Toronto. I found a lot of books of poetry: Wallace Stevens; Billy Collins; Auden; Frost; Szymborska; Milosz. I also found books by Grass and Proust that I had planned to read. Well, lately I felt I was ready for Proust after all these years.

I read thirty pages last night and was, quite frankly, intimidated. Occasionally I write something reasonably good and I hurry to put commas around statements and call it verse. Proust, for passages of prose on end, writes poetry. Sentence after sentence is beautiful and meandering and hitting the spot- just hitting the spot in describing the type of thoughts or memories I have while falling asleep.