Intimate Converse

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is a pleasure beyond compare.

-- Yoshida Kenko (1283? – 1350?), Japanese author and Buddhist monk, The Tzuredzure Gusa (Essays In Idleness) of Yoshida no Kaneyoshi, as translated by George Sansom (1911)