To move, as you say, from word to word is how I work as a reader and how I work as a writer and it's all I expect from a thing that is made out of words. When words rub up against each other and manage to make up a sentence that has, as they say, a beginning and middle and end and I can take a breath at the sentence's end and be pleased with what sensations that sentence may deliver to me: as a reader, as a writer, I am content to live for a while with that. I am a voraciously slow reader, an easily distracted reader. But there are sentences in the world, and sometimes even entire sequences of such sentences that make the world disappear. They cast a spell, set me up into a trance, and when the spell breaks - for whatever reason - I'm not sure that I know, or that it matters, that any sort of action or plot has been enacted. So, no, do I read for plot, for story, or information: no, I can't say that I do, which I'm sure has set me back in situations where I was asked to take in the given information and perhaps even offer a response. There is already too much information in the world. I don't know what to do with most of what I know. I read for the same reason that I fish. So I can feel what I see.
~Peter Markus
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