In groups of people, particularly of family, my mind can sometimes feel like a garden wilting in relentless sun. I need solitude, or movement, or ideally both to restore my thoughts to their unshriveled state.

For there she was.

For it was a snail.

The for operated in my mind as the fixation point (often a small black square) that researchers use to anchor the centers of images to help them investigate the visual phenomenon of what they call "binocular rivalry."

… Woolf knew… that the brain and the page are also real places. One moves through life composing, not copy, but the sentences through which the world and one's heart become known.

I sent my sister the clip. "I remember it as something that happened to US," she texted back. "We invented mirror neurons."

She's right, I thought. So many events felt this way as they unfolded in our childhood, the two of us close and in joint understanding.

POETS LOVE WALTER BENJAMIN. He often wrote criticism and philosophy as if they were poetry, gathering strange assemblances, making associative leaps, and turning his attention to objects others may have viewed as of little significance.

When I read Quentin Bell's biography of Woolf, I stop at 1940 because I don't want to kill her. If I hold back the page, she'll never reach the river.

[Virginia Woolf] even wrote of words as moths, noting how in daily life "[W]e refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die."

A garden was among the first examples Foucault gave when he was developing his concept of heterotopia —a space that is apart from but nonetheless shaped by the society that made it. (Some others: a library, a ship, a prison.) A heterotopia, he wrote, must be entered ritually…

I have a stronger memory of visiting Bekonscot Model Village, "the world's oldest and original model village" … We encountered the village as the scholar Yael Padan argues tourists often do, as a representation of the nation in which—like an orrery—time and space are condensed. Bekonscot was first opened to the public in 1929, and while some of the