Attempt 1

I couldn't read this book until I realised I was fully out of love with you. Somehow I was horrified of associating you with mutilated locks and necromantic medics. Atypical, really, as it would be fruitless to try and count the times when I've been reading and wondered 'what would () think?'. Its probably something to do with names, referential signifiers, you'd know more about that than I would.
We appeared to grow up through those books: together? apart? It hardly seems worth wondering anymore. Our pathologies stretched in lines before us, a highway measured by our bookshelves. Look where they brought us to! To class war, to marching in the pouring rain down grey stained streets, to smoking outside coffee shops and arguing about situationism (much to the dismay of passing preppies) or drunken renditions of the red flag in crowded bars.
In short, through the annotations in each other's books, we can tell the stories of our lives, through what we felt it right to write on (or do squiggles around the margins of) you can tell affinities, projections, our post hoc interpretations of our younger selves.

But how did these words beget our deeds? In what perverse way did the traces left by dead (wo)men with tragic stories - Blake, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Marx, Wolstoncroft, Debord (to name a few who's insides bear your inscriptions: 'will to power as biology', 'race as veil of maya', 'utter bollocks') - set our living hearts and limbs alive? What force in these aged projected us forward into action.
You put your finger on the essence of it once in traffic, nonchalantly flicking through Ayer and biting your lips before looking up shraply and saying
'You can't live like that, can you?'
I've been trying to reach to the bottom of that profound statement since you said it. Our Fred gets you, as proved by your vigorous underlining in my '...Zarathustra', you both remain a mystery to me. Maybe that's because I live through these books whereas they live through you. I'm trying to understand us both.

The starting point has to be this radical deficiency we found with the world. That it made no sense. This huge swirling tornado, affectionately called 'life', was wont to rip the head off of anything in its way. To deny it was there, and that was what I think you were railing against, was impossible. You are it, you can't deny yourself. But to just accept it? To shrug and say 'that's life'? Why couldn't we have done that? Is Pathology the neccesarry precondition for philosophy and art? The answer to that question is probably 'yes'. How arrogant we must be to look at this glorious mess of a world and want to systematise it, explain it, represent it anew! I guess we needed those treatise and poems to make our lives bearable. It seems as if unless we can understand our relation to the world we are powerless against it, or, that through our intoxication with ideas we are somehow safe. So we picked up our texts like a soldier his rifle, or an alcoholic his bottle.