The reading public reading in public, vol. 3

Letter No. 72: Includes evidence of time spent in coffeeshops and on city streets stalking readers of print.

Dr Essai has been about the boulevards and sidewalks and subways of America again, camera ready, seeking encounters with The Blessed Who Read. The Blessed did not disappoint. And while I have you here, dear Jogglers, thank you for reading.

This means of communicating one’s thoughts [reading] evidently leads to the dissipation of ignorance, which is the custodian and the safeguard of well-policed states. — Voltaire

When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. — Charles Lamb

I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.” — Virginia Woolf

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t. — Sigrid Nunez