This is an extraordinarily vivid and touching book about old age, a totally unstructured, almost surreal portrait of the disintegrating world of a great intellectual, the Indian summer of a great man of letters. The Elide that we encounter in this book is a man who tries in vain to stop the inevitable advance of death's glacier by throwing in its path words, words, words: papers, books, articles, about books, reviews, responses to reviews, encyclopedias about books and on and on and on.