Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion. Dancing is the body's song, and Bess sang.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.