Many times I found myself in a car with the same man, a civil servant who like me must have been working late; he never noticed me, since he was always immersed in a book. This man, otherwise so unremarkable, read in a remarkable way: while his eyes ran over the lines, his lips moved as if he were saying the words, but without any sound that I could hear, not even a whisper; and I felt then something like Augustine’s surprise when he saw for the first time Ambrose of Milan reading silently, with his eyes only—a thing the provincial Augustine didn’t know was possible, since he could only read
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