Sometimes a philosopher gets sleepy.  The intensity of his gaze wavers, and it ceases to circumscribe conceptual territories or carve out logical pathways.  Perhaps, ala Descartes’ dream, the books piled on his desk begin to disappear and pop up elsewhere; or, it may be, ala Foucault’s nightmare, that the single text before him simply clouds over and vanishes.  When the eyes of a philosopher dim, his eyelids often flutter.  They beat unevenly or clap erratically.  They shudder, and vision itself begins to shiver.  Like a Sunday jaunt taken Monday morning or the flight patterns of a winded butterfly, a philosopher’s gaze glazes over  and passes hither and thither, scuttling at one moment across the dusty crevice of his lamp shade and at another between the crumpled contours of his radiator – transitive, interstitial.  It was at just such a moment that this philosopher, dilly-dallying a bit, as is his wont, got doubly distracted, and, rather than daydream about daydreams, which he would otherwise have done, he got curious about curiosities.

'You know Melissa, right?'
'I've met her ... there's something hard around her eyes.'
'Yah, well.  She's gone through some pretty awful shit.  But what do you mean hard?'
'Mmm.  You know those condemned buildings - with the wood slats nailed across the windows?  The slats never cover the windows entirely; it's simply a gesture.  That's what her eyes looked like.' 

I heard, the other day, the story of a boy, living in the hills of northern Virginia.  Summer nights, the fat rain came clambering down on the tin roof above his head.  In the fall, however, the pecan tree, heavy with nuts, bent low over his house.  And, when it rained, the raindrops plucked the pecans from the sky and chased them to the tin sheets below.  Yes, it was the story of a boy, one autumn night, under pecan rain.