История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 146 стр.

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on objects, and the resulting high degree of participation by the viewer in order to

complete what is only hinted at in the mosaic mesh of dots.

PRIVATE READING.

It is summer. Sunk deep in the soft bed among feather pillows in the grey

village of Saint-Sauveur-en -Puisaye, an eight-year-old girl is silently reading Vitor

Hugo’s Les Miserables. She doesn’t read many books; she rereads the same ones

over and over again. She feels she can nestle in its pages “like a dog in its kennel.”

Now, stretched out in the muffled bed, holding the treasured book in both hands

and propping it up on her stomach, she has established not only her own space but

her own measure of time. She doesn’t know it, but in the Abbey of Fontevrault,

Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, who died in 1204, lies sculpted in stone on the lid of

her tomb, holding a book in exactly the same manner.

I too read in bed. In the long succession of beds in which I spent the nights

of my childhood, in strange hotel rooms, in houses whose smells and sounds were

unfamiliar to me, the combination of bed and book granted me a sort of home,

which I knew I could go back to, night after night, every day. What took place,

took place in the book, and I was the story’s teller. Life happened because I turned

the pages.

I knew that not every book was suitable for reading in bed. Detective stories

and tales of the supernatural were most likely to grant me a peaceful sleep. There is

no doubt that the act of reading in time requires a corresponding act of reading in

place, and the relationship between the two acts is obvious. There are books I read

in armchairs, and there are books I read at desks, in subways, on streetcars and on

buses. I find that books read in trains have something of the quality of books read

in armchairs, perhaps because in both I can easily abstract myself from

surroundings. “The best time for reading a good stylish story,” said the English