âStill, Iâm glad Iâm not the reader I was in college any more, and Iâll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader â the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individualâs experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but a quest for it.â
â Zadie Smith: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (p. 56)












