From time to time, thoughts on the practice of reading aloud, the books, and what this has meant.
In a blink, I'm back in the space and time of a younger man reading these books on Greyhound buses, or on beaches, or on holidays. Sometimes, I remember staying home, pretending to be ill, to read Little Dorrit, to get ahead, so I could move on to another Dickens after Our Mutual Friend.
I can sort of see this wave massing on the horizon, the grief that is going to come. I'm hoping that maybe, by making it public, I'll feel I can continue somehow to send these stories out there, if they have found another kind of audience who are loving them too.
As I look at these black marks on a white page, I think: I am somehow reaching back to another embodied person. George Eliot, sitting at her desk with her pen, writing her words. An embodied person. And out of that mind, this connection into my mind, through time and space, through this medium of the book.