"It was now that she developed her feelings about reading at random which would form the backbone of her essays on being a self-educated reader. Like all her central preoccupations, the idea of 'the common reader' is rooted in childhood and adolescence."

"'Reading makes me intensely happy, and culminates in a fit of writing always.'"

"'I feel always that writing is an irreticent thing to be kept in the dark--like hysterics.'"

* * *

These three extracts appear in Hermione Lee's biography of Viriginia Woolf; the latter two are quotations from Woolf's own letters as a young woman.

I was talking, over coffee yesterday, to Monica about why I am periodically drawn to reading the biographies of writers I admire . . . and this is why: because I love to watch how their brains learn to work. These three extracts carry me from the practice of reading (random, obsessive), into the purpose of reading (the triggering of deep pleasure, which in turn opens the writing door), into the odd, wall-less, floor-less, roof-less, unsettling experience of writing itself, that embarrassing, "irreticent thing."

I feel these comments deeply, of course. Being the reader I am, and have been for all of my life--greedy, ambitious, random--I am drawn to another of my kind. There are not so many of us. But I'm also interested in the way in which this reading voracity is the foundation for the very different sensation of writing-- so much shakier, so much diffidence; the nerves on fire; unease and an urge toward secrecy. I recognize this, too: how I have all my writing life felt as if I should keep my identity a secret; how I sometimes have to purposely assume a bardic persona in my poems as a way to argue with my urge to hide.

* * *

But why hide, when reading and writing have been the open sky of my life? It is a conundrum.