A writer who, at lunch yesterday, told me about the book she has been working on for more than a year, despite the fact that she is no longer interested in the subject matter, which involves a public figure who was famous in the previous century, and who still is famous, though he is no longer alive, also told me, after we'd finished our lunch and had left the restaurant and were standing in the sun on the sidewalk in the neighborhood in which we'd met, and from which we'd soon depart, that once this book is finished, and is published, she's never going to write again, though when I asked her what she would do instead of writing, which till now has been the pursuit from which she has made her career, she only shrugged and smiled and looked at me with relief.