A small reading room kept in plain sight.
I have been writing here, on and off, for about ten years now, mostly to keep myself honest about the books I claim to have finished. The site is more ledger than essay collection — a way of noticing what I have noticed, in roughly the order I noticed it, and of leaving small markers for the version of me who will, inevitably, forget.
By trade I work in and around libraries, which is to say I spend a great deal of time near books without quite reading them. The rest of my hours go to a long-running translation project, a garden that humours me, and a cello that does not. I am told this is a reasonable life, and on most evenings I am inclined to agree.
The writing here is slow on purpose. Posts arrive when they are ready and not before; some pieces sit in a drawer for years before they earn their way out. I prefer the older virtues — patience, footnotes, the willingness to be wrong in public — to the newer ones, whatever those happen to be this season.
There is a particular pleasure in finding, in a second-hand book, the previous owner's quiet argument with the author. Pencil only, please; ink presumes too much. The best annotations are the ones that admit confusion rather than perform it.
I have set aside a shelf for books I refuse to finish quickly — three pages an evening, no more. The discipline is not piety but greed; I have come to suspect that some books, treated tenderly, last considerably longer than a year.
Watched a friend stitch a signature with a needle the size of a small grievance. The thread, she said, must be waxed but not too much, and pulled but not too hard. I think of this often when writing sentences.
I have been losing an argument with the second movement for nearly a month. It is not the notes; it is the rests. I am told this is the usual order of things, and that the rests, eventually, will start to lose back.
The lower path floods every March and reappears in April with the smug authority of something that has known all along it would. I went down on Tuesday to confirm it was still there. It was.
Letters, real or otherwise, are gratefully received at the address in the colophon. I answer slowly and with care, which is to say: eventually.