“There is an almost unearthly directness to the interaction with books that Day describes here. She reads about something and walks out to look at it. Over time, the books open up reality to her, through the medium of words and authors. It is for this reason, I think, that she refers to the books as “companions” and compares her life with books to her life with the living human beings who lived in her houses. And yet her reading could have gone in any number of directions. A reader of Sinclair, London, or Dickens could take refuge in empty, self-aggrandizing talk about the injustice of things. Such talk would find a hospitable audience among the liberal middle class of New York or Chicago, as Day knows well. Or the books could have remained distractions, idle forms of entertainment. Day is a writer committed to encouragement, unwilling to speak ill of anyone, even her preconverted self. Yet in her autobiography From Union Square to Rome, Day describes using reading to escape from a feeling of profound depression, in which she is “overwhelmed by the terror and the blackness of both life and death”:”