A few days ago I mentioned Virginia Woolf's novel The Years, which I said I was not reading. Naturally, however, I couldn't resist taking it up again, and it's been my headache-fighting partner for the past several days.

Last night I reached my very favorite part of the book, which is too long to quote for you. Anyway, quoting is beside the point. I don't return to this scene for its language but merely for its existence. Late in the evening, the character Kitty, now middle-aged and married to a lord, leaves her London house after a dull dinner party and catches an overnight train alone to her husband's estate in the north. She is so joyous about her solitude, so pleased about every step of the trip . . . and what I love most is the image of her in bed on the train, feeling the sleeping compartment move, absorbing the sensation of rushing forward into the unseen darkness yet having no responsibility for the motion.

When I was a child, I had a series of bedtime imaginings. I would get into bed and choose which place to be: perhaps a horse-drawn wagon slowly moving across a plain, or a barge on a river, or a sleeping car on a train. This was well before I was reading Woolf novels, and I had never spent the night in any of these places. They were pure invention. But when, on my first pass through The Years, I reached this scene with Kitty, I tripped headlong into the deep, deep pleasure that Woolf describes--the sweetness of falling asleep in motion--and I never get tired, never will get tired, of rereading the scene because the moment will always seem to belong to me.