Loss of the opposition becomes, in effect, a loss of polarity, and a loss of mystery. Not so much the mystery of unknown things, of the next scientific horizon, but the underscored mystery of self, of being.

A reader in the full flush of absorption will not be aware of turning words into mental entities. The conversion is automatic, as unconscious as highway driving. We often don’t register what we are doing for pages at a time. In this peculiar condition, a misprinted word can be as suddenly jarring as the sight of a hubcap rolling toward us down the

essay “The Delta Factor,” “Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?” Why are we “lost in the cosmos?” Why do we feel so deeply, if unconsciously, disconnected?

the original question remains: What does this steadily throbbing shimmer hold for us? How is it revising our ideas about the larger human project? What continuities remain, and how do we contend—collectively and individually—with all the breaks and rifts, all the spots where traditions can no longer carry us over?

A page was a field studded with tantalizing signs and a book was a vast play structure riddled with openings and crevices I could get inside.

Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don’t just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity.

In his justly celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin sets forth the idea, now almost commonplace, that the copying and disseminating of, say, a painting robs it of its aura. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique

Our passage into bright contemporaneity has carried a price: The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.

For literature remains the unexcelled means of interior exploration and connection-making.