I told him, for instance, how I had come to experience time differently. The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited. He could relate to this: as he fed one piece of type into the composing stick, he was spotting the nick and face of the next one. “Now” did not seem to exist. He also told me the biggest influence of his work in his life had been that it had taught him to see the world backward. This was the main thing typesetters and revolutionaries had in common: they knew the matrix of the
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