It’s just past midnight on a Tuesday. I’m lying in bed with my dog on one side, a cooling cup of tea on the other. My husband is asleep, lightly snoring, having already embarked, no doubt, on tonight’s unconscious adventures.
In the street below, it’s starting to rain. I can tell by the cling-clang of drops on the city’s metal and also by the new way sound seems to carry. A young woman’s playful shriek, a baby’s shrill cry, these
sounds echo around the block and reach me finally, as if from a great distance.
I’ve just closed John Williams’ Stoner, just consumed the final delicious lines not for the first time nor nearly the last. Now I lie
very quiet and very still with the book in my lap, feeling its precious weight in my hands, feeling the way I almost always feel upon finishing a novel: impossibly painfully irrevocably human.
That’s why I read, I think.
In a highly collaborative effort of imagination and feeling, I connect with the story, the characters, the writer, and also with something deep inside myself.
