Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.

Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit.

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

Information is the religion of the modern world.

Every decoding is another encoding.

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.