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[Recited Baudelaire's "To The Reader." After nine stanzas, he stopped, thinking poem over, but, after some prompting from me, delivered the final, killer four lines:

Boredom! He smoked his hookah, while he dreams
Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother.
You know this dainty monster, too, it seems--
Hypocrite reader!--You!--My twin!--My brother!

He also talked of esoteric Christianity, Khalil Gibran and the Bhagavad Gita, how commentaries ruin it. Said I was a kindred spirit before we parted.]





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