A Reading

This, from "The Woman in the Garden," by Sven Birkerts.

"We do not open to the first page and find ourselves promptly transported away from our surroundings and concerns. What takes place is a gradual immersion, an exchange whereby we hand over our groundedness in the here and now in order to take up our new groundedness in the elsewhere of the page. The more fully we can accomplish this, the more fully we can be said to be reading. The tree in front of us must dim so that the tree on the page can take on outline and mass. The operation is hardly passive. We collude at every point. We will that it be so. We project ourselves at the word, and pass through it as through a turnstile. And we do this, often, with an astonishing facility—something in us must need it. A reader in the full flush of absorption will not be aware of turning words into mental entities. The conversion will be automatic, and as unconscious as highway driving. We don't often register what we're doing for pages at a time. In this peculiar condition, a misprinted word can be as suddenly jarring as the sight of a hubcap rolling toward us down the center-line" (382).



Fields of Writing: Readings Across the Disciplines, Fourth Ed.