The noted Dutch poet and novelist Cees Nooteboom reflects on the life of the mind through a reexamination of books, music, art, travel, and gardening "Nooteboom's real subject is the one that's defined his career--mainly, the persistent strangeness of existence and its refusal to be fully resolved by religion, philosophy, or science. . . . His journal . . . can seem like a medieval bestiary, a nature chronicle with the vividness of...