Some reading is more like swimming. On the second page of the latest New York Review of Books, I found and immediately read a piece by Anne Carson:

WHAT TO SAY OF

THE ENTIRETY

I swam down the square text like a a salmon to the spawning ground. I swam up. Every time I read it I paused at different moments. It came and went. I hung around the punctuation. The information. I lay still on the questions.

Do we really need to make it worse? Do you think of yourself as a well-loved person?

There are few writers who make me stay with them as Anne Carson does. I don't want to leave. As with the mastermoments of Schubert or Mozart. They are there long after they stop.

Where to start? Start in the middle (and why?) so as not to end up there,

Weaving through the world and its meanings, offering advice, kindly meant, polite.

You have to know what you want, know what you think, know where to go.

The text is in a square box in the middle of the lower middle of the page. The satisfaction of this is enormous. I cut it out and put it on my desk where I'd see it often.