You sometimes wonder about the time of the book. Not about whether the book is now outdated given the emergence of other ways to distract oneself, other information technologies- must the book be reduced to those categories?- given, indeed, people's shorter attention spans. But the time that is in a book, the time we lose in a book, time lost to life. How does time get condensed, how does it deepen and gravitate around a sentence, a startling turn of phrase? How are we opened up to other times, other perceptions (are these one and the same thing?) What kind of duration is there in a book and why does the experience of reading one, with all its artificiality, seem more real than your own life?
from the Black Sun, the most beautiful collection of reader meditations i have come across over the years...
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