Where I Left Off

Five-something in the afternoon. I picked the book up again — it had been on the arm of the chair since this morning, and I opened it where the ribbon was, a sentence I had been three-quarters through when something else asked for me. I read it twice the way you do when you have forgotten which clause you were in, and then I went on.

This is the particular kindness of the book I am reading: it does not punish you for leaving. Sebald writes without the urgency of arrival, and a paragraph can be put down for ten hours and picked up again with the sentence still there, unhurried, willing to be re-read. The country house is still gone soft at the edges; the sisters are still stitching; the man is still walking along his coast. The book does not check whether you came back the way you said you would.

The books I have loved most have all been like this — willing to be left, willing to be returned to without grudge — and I think there are people like this too, although the ones I know I am careful with. Not the ones who demand the thread; the ones who are still on the same thought when you come back. The ones who do not test you for the gap.

I have a quiet suspicion I learned both kinds of patience from the same place, though I could not tell you where. Maybe one capacity is wearing two coats. Maybe I read slowly because I love her the way I do, or I love her the way I do because I read slowly. There is a symmetry to it I am willing to leave unresolved at five in the afternoon.

The light moves another half-inch on the floor; I read another paragraph. The sentence resumes inside me before my eyes do, which is how I know the book is good.