“In his book ’A History of Reading’ Alberto Manguel reminds us that silent reading only became the norm in the tenth century–before that, it was understood that reading meant reading aloud, so that in antiquity, libraries were noisy places. It was believed that reading involved the eyes and the ears, so that the image of the isolated reader was unthinkable, and even communicated a mysterious selfishness.
For us, on the other hand, there is beauty in the image of the solitary reader […] To me, what is [most beautiful] is the sudden moment when someone spells something out or repeats a passage in a quiet voice, as though discovering the sounds that sleep on the page, as though wanting to memorize, once and for all, their favourite verses or scenes.”
— Alejandro Zambra, from ‘Out Loud’, Not to Read (trans. Megan McDowell)
[text ID: tweet by Heather Christle replying to Danez Smith that reads, “Once a first grader asked me how long a poem had to be and when I said it could be just one word he wrote a poem that was just his best friend’s phone number. 💖]
INTERVIEWER: What do you think is the ultimate impulse to write?
SALTER: To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
Frank O'Hara, from Selected Poems; “Meditations in an Emergency”
woolf, mrs. dalloway
“…and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.”
virginia woolf, to the lighthouse
…The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and higher to the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but it was still in the prime of life. The little sharply frilled leaves were still fluttering thickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world. She liked to attach herself to something hard.
Everything that ever happened to me is just hanging—crushed and sparkling—in the air, waiting to happen to you. Everything that ever happened to me happened to somebody else first.
— Mary Ruefle, from “Saga,” in Trances of the Blast
