Critics and poets compared, philosophy and poetry, love of people and love of words. Blake and the #MeToo, Joyce as seen by Virginia Woolf and Svevo's Zeno, Socrates and Montale, the Homeric gods, Catullus, Dante, Freud: a writer's journey through the pages he loved and his insights, through the filter of life. Like Stanley searching for the sources of the Nile - not to explain, but to keep searching. For "in writing and reading we look like Stanley for the traces of someone, or perhaps more than someone, who got lost searching for the sources of the Nile. The explorers who went into the jungle are our readings. The search is the poetic world." And again, "We were following Livingstone but from the beginning we began to doubt that he had passed this way. We begin to feel the dangers he survived, the prices he paid, we ourselves begin to fear being wounded. After all, literature always wounds, we knew that, and anyway we are here now, no going back. Are we reading? translating? writing? Let's hope we can smile about it...."