« Over time, every reader accrues a kind of sedimentary layer of insights and impressions; he also establishes a vast hoard of very particular recollections. Of scenes, images, and seemingly irrelevant bric-a-brac. As often as not, these are fragments retained for whatever reason from books otherwise forgotten. It is almost as if the ultimate point of certain reading has been the survival of some odd trace. Again, as in life, so in art. Just as most of what happens to us dissolves, becomes part of an inner compost known in generalized terms—"my high school years,“ “boot camp,” and so on—so most of what we have read loses definition and becomes a blurry wash. Against this unfeatured backdrop emerge the distinct survivals, the details that for one reason or another we recall. They are not always, or even often, the key elements of the work. We preserve them illogically, savoring their perverse irrelevance, in the same way that we recall the cheap plastic lanyard worn by our grade school gym teacher or the face of the man who ran the hamburger stand. Why this and not that? Who can say? […]
With each retrieval I not only re-experience something of the flavor of the book, the dense reality it enfolds, but I also recover, if only fleetingly, the original circumstance of my reading—a train ride, a favorite chair in an old apartment, the atmosphere of a long, disconsolate summer. Works of imagination bleed together with the world they extrapolate from. […] There [they] hibernate, a cluster of stray images, forgotten incitements and conversational asides, a mass of shadow wrapping itself around the thoughts and gestures of the self. » — Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies
