Seneca

We were talking about which books to read, weren't we? Part of a conversation of having only so much time to live, the finiteness of mortality--which in the past had only been a hazy kind of concept to us--now taking more definite shape, and decisions about how to use our time from this point forward becoming more important than ever...

I said, Seneca and wrote his name down on a piece of paper.

You've never heard of him.

Seneca was exiled by Nero for a trifling offense to the state and wrote an essay on stoicism, I said.

You seemed mildly interested, not interested enough to ask me the name of anything Seneca wrote but interested enough to continue listening to me, and so I continued talking.

Don Quixote, The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy...I write these titles on the same piece of paper.

It's very late by now, we'd had a few drinks.

I've never read Tolstoy, you say.

Anna Karenina, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Trollope, Huck Finn, As I Lay Dying, Steinbeck East of Eden...I can't write fast enough.