I spent a good portion of the weekend sorting through my books, weeding out things to discard, and reorganizing their order on the shelves--a tidying frenzy that has created a mess, for now my bedroom floor is stacked with homeless volumes. But the books on the shelves look happier. And not only did I find my long-vanished and -lamented copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, but I've also gained a certain hardhearted pleasure in getting rid of books, especially poetry collections. There is something cathartic about announcing, "I WILL NEVER READ THIS AGAIN," and pitching a prize-winning, celestially blurbed volume of contemporary dreck into the giveaway box.

from If on a winter's night a traveler

Italo Calvino

The professor is there at his desk; in the cone of light from a desk lamp his hands surface, suspended, or barely resting on the closed volume, as if in a sad caress.

     "Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead. . . . "