I've finally finished a long and knotty editing project, with great relief. It seemed to go on forever. This past week, which I mostly spent correcting endless pages of voluminous misnumbered footnotes, felt like the Death-Knell of the Imagination. Probably reading Babbitt concurrently has not helped matters. Also, it's school vacation week, meaning that my house has been overrun with loud hungry boys, and now my older son is running a science-fair experiment that involves a homemade hovercraft and a vacuum cleaner. 

from Letter to Jane, a collection of Hayden Carruth's letters to Jane Kenyon, written during the year she was dying of leukemia.

I have been reading nothing but novels of crime and espionage, drug-store books, what we used to call "cheap-screw fiction." And I can't remember most of the time what was on the previous page as I'm reading. It doesn't matter any more. Reading is not for information but for the flow of language and the old associations in my head.