The Funeral of a Friend

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Nightwood

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Herzog

Ragtime

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Dune

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Wuthering Heights

Leaves of Grass

The Return of the Native

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Walden

The Invisible Man

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The Future of an Illusion

Tropic of Cancer

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Two Solitudes

The Second Scroll

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The Metamorphosis

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The Antichrist

Nineteen Eighty-Four

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The Pawnbroker

Night

For My Brother Jesus

Operation Shylock

They kept on coming until the place looked like a library.

We are gathered here today to pay great tribute and most sincere respects to our dear friend, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He was quite admired by us all, and we will immensely miss his joyous way of life. We have considered ourselves to be bereft of mortality, but as we have all witnessed, death can and will strike us under special circumstances. We lack the knowledge of the mechanisms that drive us to our perdition, but with the help of simple intuition we can ascertain that a flaw in our character may lead us into the realm of oblivion. Let us take a precious moment to gather our thoughts and remember A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man! They dug into their pasts and found a few vacant passages, and when the room was filled with all these virgin memories, they slowly began to sing:

You can’t always read what you want.

You can’t always read what you want.

You can’t always read what you want.

And if you try sometimes, you might find

That you read what you need, oh yeah.

They sang with their literary voices until Nineteen Eighty-Four slowly got up and left.

Tropic of Cancer was first at the buffet table. They watched him as he ate with his apish appetite. Soon enough, they followed, and the table became the centre of the world. Dishes proceeded in a pieceful parade, forks penetrated with steely determination, mouths moved in manic manipulation, and food disappeared with approved dispositions. And as soon as the table became bereft of fare, they all left as they came. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man was later cremated and his ashes scattered all over the uncivilized world.