I was thinking yesterday about why I read, I was reading and I was thinking how reading rarely brings me the level of enjoyment I get from eating, drinking, exercising, watching TV, socialising, and all manner of other activities. I had been reading Mathias Enard’s novel Zone for a couple of weeks, and had reached a yet another section detailing graphic acts of violence. I realised I wanted the book to be finished, I had got everything that I possibly could out of it and I wanted to read something else. But then I stopped to consider how I was feeling: I was feeling calm and stable, and I rarely feel calm and stable. And then, on the next page, Enard’s single sentence sped up, the few commas he uses to pace his sentence (the novel consists of a single sentence) disappeared almost completely, and I was engrossed. It reminded me of several reading experiences I’ve had in my life, in which I am no longer reading for meaning as such but just parsing the words themselves, their sound, their rhythm, how they look on the page, and this creates a grander impression, a glut of meaning more than the sum of its parts, more than can be represented in grammatical logic. This reminded me in turn of those who have seen language as something to transcend, a layer of abstraction placed like a veil over the physical world, the real: Mishima, Lacan, Klossowski, many others.