Every fart results in the loss of a small patch of the soul, as constituted by the breath, the ruach, the exhalation that goes out through the back door. Pythagoras knew this. And he forbade the eating of beans out of love for the soul.

The teens do not understand how anyone could believe the world isn’t circular. “The world is a merry-go-round,” the middle teen tells me. “The world is the sort of circus that has merry-go-rounds on the regular,” the younger teen adds.

If the Earth were not spherical, then I would have seen it all while sitting on a rock beside the ocean, or at least glimpsed the entire ship on the horizon rather than seeing its mast move close to me first, spotting that tip so to speak, without the body. Bobbing on the surface like a head without a corpus.

For Plato, the spherical shape of the earth meant that the heavens were also spherical: a spherical Universe moved in a circular motion.

Following his mentor, Aristotle damned comets to the realm of the spheres, relegating these flying shards of fire to the earth's disorder rather than the perfect harmony and geometry of the celestial sphere. In the earth's upper atmosphere, Earthly exhalations would burst into flame and these bursts would resemble comets. The comet is the thing of this world, profaned by its venturing into the ether between worlds.

"The writer is a comet," I explained to my friend, who could not get his novel about southern ghosts published.

"Yes, the writer is an engine of profanation fueled by blood until the heart gives up," I told my dog, Radu, after discovering the author, Enrique Vila-Matas, wandering down the streets of Dublin with his character, Riba. These two fellows, the writer and his character, were strolling along when they both spotted an "irate, limping man" on page 106, a man who suddenly became an "irate ethereal man" after stepping into the doorway on page 107, since the doorway is a literary threshold with the power to make a minor god of most verb-carting mammals.

The name of the book is Dublinesque.

And —- “What will become of all this misery of ours? In the end, only an old whore walking around in an absurd raincoat, on a lonely dike in the rain.”

This is what Samuel Beckett wrote in Krapp's Last Tape.

And maybe the intellectual was correct to note that Beckett’s ‘old whore’ was likely Celia —- who had been an innocent, young whore when she appeared in Murphy, and who coincidentally shared a name with Riba's Buddhism-exploring wife, a name which Riba immediately grasped after catching an eyeful of Catherine Deneuve’s trench coat and that barely-cocked hat she wore in Cherbourg, the coat and the hat and her flesh certainly naked underneath all that, as rain would suggest, was Literature itself, or all the desires and erotic gropings were books in which what began as fantasy bloomed into fruit, or fruited and got plucked and tasted on Bloomsday, as it was known.

This day of penultimate blooming happens again every year.

Riba ran into Beckett wearing a trench coat on page 193, and recognized Beckett immediately on the basis of small, insignificant details, which is to say: literature. Vila-Matos’ character knew it was Beckett from the way he stared directly at him with "his bird-like face" clearly traced from the drawings of bird-men in the room known as the Dead Man's Shaft in the caves of Lascaux.

I swore I would not write a single word collaborating in that literary trope known as Lascaux Cave Aside-ism today.

Alas. It is the first day of a new year, and this is my thirteenth thought to date. Under such conditions, the thought is beholden to none, least of all, to its author. In reality, the Lascaux caves include over 600 paintings staggered across the walls and the ceilings. In the Hall of the Bulls, there is a 17-foot bull that prides himself on being the largest animal yet discovered in cave art. In the Shaft of the Dead Man, there are some stars and astronomical figures, but what I noticed first was the wall that includes a bull, a bird, and a bird-man.

O, lest I forget, happy new year to all friends and enemies, for as long as this life gives us!