I knew what it sounded like to turn the pages of William Butler Yeats. What they were doing sounded like a lot more fun. But then Lori Baker wasn't available to me, and William Butler Yeats was. Which is one of the great things about books, they're easy. Books are sluts.
Books are whores.
Anybody can get intimate with a book. I used to sit alone in the stacks at Antioch and read those poems, and reread them. I was just some kid, some lost and lonely kid at one of the two billion colleges in the state of Ohio, the Buckeye State, and yet I had William Butler Yeats all to myself. I had that man's heart in my hands. I read his biography, his autobiography, even his turgid work of philosophy.