CXXXII

But a reference book can also be all of the above without having to pretend anything at all: think of Boswell or M.'s Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna -- they are not really meant to be read like a conventional work of literature. How fantastic the scope of those books! How large they are! How long they are! How much like life they are! So little narrative or just as the narrative gets going it gets cut off -- just like life itself -- so many small details so much insignificance adding up to a great big picture, the van driver told me how he was in graduate school studying to become a preservation ornithologist. He described his fieldwork where his team went to wild areas and suspended a net between two trees that was invisible to the birds. In this manner he captured the specimens that he wanted. I asked him what he did with all the things that he captured in the net that he did not want. He said he simply threw them back. I then told him of my similar project -- that of capturing certain sounds out of the air;