Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides.

But living amid so many words, I overestimated their power and breadth. The world does not turn on words alone; it only seems to if the eye and mind are saturated with them.

Nor can I throw a book away. I have given many away and ripped a few in half, but as with warring nations, destruction shows regard: the enemy is a power to reckon with. Throwing a book out shows contempt for an effort of the spirit. Not that I haven't tried.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.