Feeling such emotions, it was impossible not to elevate the stream and hose down, as they say, a few literary masterpieces.

I may as well point out that I was able to hit titles all the way up on the third and fourth shelves. When you get into your middle years, as I have, these things matter.

I shook and put it away. Since I’m being frank, I ought to say that I went through the mature man’s generic process of shaking: several rapid shakes followed by a brief rest followed by more jiggling, and the whole ordeal repeated until everything feels comfortably dry and secure. As I grow longer in the tooth, I find myself shaking off for greater and greater stretches of time, and I always use this time to fret morosely about my health in general, and about the likelihood that a grave illness, conceivably located in the bladder region, will overtake me in the future, maybe imminently. In this way a pleasurable, natural act becomes the catalyst for somber reflections and an unnatural, incipient depression. So much of life follows this pattern exactly, I think. We begin to lose ourselves in a joyful or gratifying act—it can be a creature comfort or something complicatedly emotional like stimulating conversation or the solitary immersion in a poem, a beautiful landscape, or a work of art—and we forget, in the moment of serenity, all the pain and trouble of life. Until, quite suddenly and, as a rule, shockingly, this very forgetfulness, our fleeting holiday from care, becomes nothing more than another occasion to remember how truly infrequently happiness comes to us, and how likely we are to die in some horrible way. Then, disgusted with ourselves over our inability to enjoy life, we halt the pleasurable activity and move on, as speedily as we can, to other business. It was precisely this kind of dispirited self-loathing that led me to give myself only a few cursory shakes, so that when I replaced myself in my trousers, I felt urine dribbling down my leg. As always when this happens, I became enraged. I became angry and irrational. The night was cold, and I struggled against despair.

The struggle, however, was unavailing.

I wept.