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‘How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in pursuit of books!' ‘Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor , but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like' 'The story of man's travels through his own texts remains in large measure unknown.' ‘In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meaning inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But since he in incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments “lost” in reading. He insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's body. Ruse , metaphor, arrangement, this production is also an “invention” of the memory. Words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text; the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news. The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place.' 'Mais ma grande-mère, même si le temps trop chaud s’etait gâté, si un orage ou seulement un grain était survenu, venait me supplier de sortir. Et ne voulant pas renoncer à ma lecture, j’allais du moins la continuer au jardin, sous la marronier, dans une petite guérite en sparterie et en toile au fond de laquelle j’étais assis et me croyais caché aux yeux des personnes qui pourraient venir visite à mes parents.' |
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