he would sometimes walk through the adult stacks , looking at the thousands of volumes and imagining a world of lives inside each one , the way he sometimes walked along his street in the burning smoke-hazed twilight of a late-october afternoon , the sun only a bitter orange line on the horizon , imagining the lives going on behind all the windows-people laughing or arguing or arranging flowers or feeding kids or pets or their own faces while they watched the boobtube .