Shutting her eyes, letting the crowd steer her, she saw behind closed lids the books that awaited her, the thinkers’ collected voices inked onto each crowded page. An ecstasy of ink, every paragraph laboring to outline the shape of the world. The yellow light of a lamp on leaves of paper, the ivory-black impress of words reasoning, line by line. Yet in the confused picture in her mind, the hands caressing and turning those lamp-lit pages were not her own, but a stranger’s. She didn’t know which she wanted more: the words or the hands, the touch to her spirit or to her skin.
