And so on, as we say around here. Wittgenstein refused to agree that the rhinoceros had gone; yet he was curious as to why Sean, the Sean from Fierro and Manning's blog, had been left unanswered for so many days. Neither Russell nor Fierro had a response. But the latter was a man enveloped by the dizzying heights of a stubborn imagination where he vied for but one celestial hour to write to his Uncle Floro, to put a pen to his head and pull the trigger.

Oh, how well three chords can undermine that moment when you dreamt you were more like Lancelot, and less like Launce or Panurge, revived amidst a crusade that's left you cursed and paralyzed, bobbing in the ebb and flow of clever writers. Awake at lunchtime, the waves grew bigger floating the famous and enemies alike about the round authorial table. Guillermo, tellingly knowledgeable and biting, ate little preferring to be the silent librettist noting down your memories rather than face the rhinal intentions of their prying questions. Why be so serene? What lunar influence could describe his case?

He could have harbored within his manhood a seat etched in snow for an adolescent to write "The Right to Shyness", leaving the others reclining reading Lafargue. He could have opened with an epigraph from Nicolson letting his friends in on the consequences of overproduction, now so justified since his twenty years: "How intolerable are those of his contemporaries who are not also shy." But shy himself, he hid instead.

In the end the old sun rose high above his hardheadedness, sending away the simple lovers hunched in betrayal, with Valentine, of Shakespeare, beside them. When from those abysmal libricidal passageways that lie between why not? and why? came a deep rumbling. And Wittgenstein, smiling wryly and wringing his hands, asked Russell: "Do you hear that?"