(I often suspected that people were only going through the motions of reading, or mimicking its stillness; did I pretend to read as a child, maybe as a way of escaping something—my father’s anger? Walking through the library in graduate school, I’d think to myself: Not a single one of you people, if I shut your book, would be able to tell me what you’ve just read. Shadow-reading. And when I myself was reading, I was acutely aware of other people watching me, of how I performed absorption, which of course distracted me from the page.)
