Bibliophobia

by Sarah Chihaya

I want to think of reading not as productivity but as a kind of produce: something that grows in whatever unpredictable way it will, sometimes smooth and beautiful and delicious, sometimes bitter and gnarled and thorny.

Schooled in the days of high literary theory, “he had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.” Now, though, language lights up and comes alive inside him: “What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not.”