FOR COMFORT HE took certain objects with him to school. They had to be simple and impermeable. Ball bearings were almost perfect. The top of his desk tipped toward him, so he would put the ball bearings into the pencil groove. When they were struck together they would make a satisfying sound, but their movement in the groove and their relative positions restricted the ways he could think about them. When he was in the third grade his father gave him a magnifying glass of the kind used by textile merchants; it opened to form three sides of a cube and folded to a flat square. The hinged workings were smooth and tight, and the brushed surface of the stainless-steel frame offered a pleasant resistance to his passing thumb and finger pads. The glass was strong, and when a friend pointed out that, abandoned on a desert island, he could use it to concentrate sunlight and start a fire the object took on extra value. He liked well-made penknives. One day in class he was playing with a penknife that had a bone handle and a scimitar-shaped blade. It closed on his right index finger. He could not open it with his left hand and had to take it to the teacher. She opened the knife and kept it, he felt unjustly. Sometimes he yearned to have a hunting knife in a leather case hidden under his arm or along his calf, but he never acted on the desire. In high school, after composing a poem, he would type it on a sheet of paper, fold the paper in four, and put it into the side pocket of his jacket to take out and read when unobserved, occasionally changing a word or phrase. He would keep the poem with him until he wrote a new one. He gave up knives in high school, and in the army all weapons became repugnant to him. But he took a penknife on his honeymoon, along with a honing stone and a can of oil to slow the action of the stone. At leisure moments he honed the knife to an ever finer edge. When his marriage in its slow dissolution took temporary turns for the better he would buy a new knife to celebrate. When he began adulterous affairs he sometimes marked them by buying a new knife. Often he carried a book with him. At its most powerful the right book, he felt, would save him from death or see him through death without panic or despair. His favorites were small editions of Herrick, Catullus, Lucretius, and Antony and Cleopatra. From a copy of Marvell’s poems he cut the page containing “To His Coy Mistress” and for years carried it with him, although he knew the poem by heart. During his long crisis, when he thought he was going to die, he was drawn to his wife’s house plants. He would study them before he left the house in the morning and when he returned in the evening. He made cuttings and distributed them to friends and neighbors so that something of the plants was sure to survive. His wife in her separation complaint mentioned the knife on the honeymoon. Recently he understood that the stroking of the knife on a stone represented the thrust of his penis in a vagina; this pleases him because he had thought that the association of knives and women came from fear or hostility. Although he travels with personal equipment—pen, keys, wallet—nothing material has saving significance for him now. Soon he will feel that the quality of immutability, which once attracted him to certain objects, is worthless and that only certain ephemeral qualities, such as those present in the body of an athlete, are reassuring. He will treasure plant seeds for their intricate organization of information and keep them on his desk like talismans.