Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

We sit in small rooms. We lean over notebooks whose paper not only is patient but also silent.

Dear Reader:

I write slowly on patient white paper and think about you. The blue ink sinks down and I almost see you. I see your hand, the left hand. Your long fingers grasp the. paper’s edge. Maybe you hate the black ink that rubs off this cheap newsprint onto your fingertips. Maybe you don’t care, or you don’t care that much. I like to think I can hear the page rattle. I like to think that I hear you exhale. If I allow myself to come close, then I feel how warm your breath is, how humid and Tahiti tropic. Your breath hints at morning coffee or afternoon Darjeeling or perhaps? Perhaps a hamburger slathered with brown German mustard. Perhaps a freckled Bosc pear.

So many people did so many things so that we could be here together. Way back in the B.C. years, writers pressed wedge-shaped wood and bone into clay tablets. At first, writers mostly wrote bills of lading, lists of who sold what to whom — bony cattle and pungent green olive oil. Egyptians, about 3500 B.C., began stripping pith from papyrus stems to make scrolls on which the few people who could write, did. They wrote in hieroglyphs. They used pens cut from reeds and lampblack for ink. Then everybody began to have alphabets and soon someone figured out how to skin sheep and goats and calves and to make vellum (a word that derives from “veal”) and to mix inks that adhered to those skins. People wrote and wrote and wrote. People, mostly rulers and rich people and poor scholars and even poorer monks and nuns, read and read and read.

They read so much that eyeglasses were invented. Roger Bacon in 1268 made what’s considered one of the earliest recorded comments on the use of lenses for improving vision. But readers, by that time, both in Europe and China, already were propping onto their noses simple magnifying lenses secured in frames. Many beautiful and important and helpful hand-lettered books, century after century, were piling up in universities and monasteries and rich people’s houses (and rich people, even back then, often read in bed). These books had authors, some of whom we still read today, but most of these authors are forgotten. Books were copied and recopied and recopied. Some of the monks who did all this copying penned comments in the margins. You can hear one lovely example of this marginalia in Samuel Barber’s “Hermit Songs,” a ten-song cycle set to poems and notes left by Irish monk-copiers during the 8th to 13th Centuries. One song, “Promiscuity,” has only two lines: “I do not know with whom Aidan will sleep. But, I do know that fair Aidan will not sleep alone.”

About 550 years ago, Germans began to build presses and cast movable type. Johann Gutenberg’s Bible, printed in two volumes in 1454, was one of the earliest examples of a book printed from movable type. After that, every year, more and more presses were built and more and more men and some women sat themselves down to write books and more books were printed and more readers read more and more books. Then Martin Luther (1483-1546) came along and decided, among other things, that everyone should learn to read the Bible for himself and herself and that decision helped start what became the Protestant Reformation, which caused endless trouble in Europe and England, so much trouble that in 1620 the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic to come to the New World to get away from all that trouble. So in one way, you could say that reading founded America. Eventually, of course, you and I came along. Someone taught you to read; someone taught me to read. “A is for Apple,” we said, “and B is for Bear and C is for the Cootie that crawls in my hair.” And then, next thing you and I knew, we were getting notes from the library that listed our overdue books.

When I am sitting early in the morning with my notebook and pen and the words won’t come, when I get discouraged and down at the mouth, I not infrequently think of you. You sit utterly still except for intakes and outtakes of breath, then a shifted buttock, then the right hand lifted to turn a page. Your eyes, an autumnal hazel or Robert Redford blue, scan left to right along ranks of type.

I read, though, just recently, that the eyes don’t travel smoothly, without interruption, from one line to the next. “The French ophthalmologist Emile Javal discovered that our eyes actually jump about the page; these jumps or saccades take place three or four times per second, at a speed of about 200 degrees per second. The speed of the eye’s motion across the page — but not the motion itself — interferes with perception, and it is only during the brief pause between movements that we actually ‘read.’ ” (A History of Reading)

I had to look up “saccade” and will save you the trouble. “A rapid intermittent eye movement, as that which occurs when the eyes fix on one point after another in the visual field” is how American Heritage defines it.

I am not anxious to make you get up from your upholstered chair or slip out from your clean or dirty sheets and walk to the dictionary. I am not eager to save souls. I do not write to improve you. I’m not interested in helping you become an informed voter or careful driver or devoted aluminum recycler. It’s not my business for whom you vote or whether you crush Diet Coke cans, hear them clink, as you toss them, one after another, into the recycling bin.

I don’t want even to make you less lonely.

Rosanna Warren wrote that to read is “to give oneself completely, if temporarily, to the keeping of another mind.” We are in that way, you and I, accomplices. We are in this together.

Readers wonder about writers. So I will tell you (although I think you already suspect) that there are so many like me. We sit in small rooms. We lean over notebooks whose paper not only is patient but also silent. I put my pen tip to paper and wait for the familiar script to arrive. I wait for the fat descenders on Y and G and the harsh straight line that tops the capital T. Jack Kerouac, when he was still young and unpublished, one morning got up, knelt by his borrowed desk, and asked God to help him write something beautiful and true. He stood, then, and pricked his finger and wrote a sentence with his own blood.

We type on ancient typewriters. The typewriter ribbon files through the metal reel. The ribbon is the color of old men’s worn winter suits. The keys strike fast, one after another, as a sudden squall will, and the sound the keys make is the sound that cold raindrops make, blown against a tin roof. Then, a lull, and hands lift from the keys. There is the stare into silence. There is the wait for the voice to speak back.

Or we gaze into a computer screen. The screen’s light phosphoresces. The light is not unlike summer night moonlight. The moon is full or a day away from full. Light soaks fields the way milk soaks dry bread, the way my Waterman’s Florida blue ink soaks white paper.

No matter how and on what we write it down, though, there is always that long silence, that abyss between sentences. The words wait at the end of a long path. The path winds. The words, some mornings, turn their backs on us, the way Miles Davis turned his back on his audiences. Miles Davis said, “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” We are trying to find what’s not yet there. We are trying to put our finger on it.

We are, most of us, so anonymous. Medieval stone masons chipped away at angels’ outspread wings. You cannot see where the mason’s hand scraped against granite. You cannot see the blood rise in maroon droplets (a maroon the same lurid color that you see in a viola called “Princess Purple and Gold”) on his swollen knuckles. You cannot see the tears.

Someone told me that when I write about tears, he felt embarrassed for me. He said that even though the person did break down and hold his head in his hands and sob, or even if she shed so many tears the tears soaked her blouse and left spots as large as the spots that a nursing mother’s breasts make, I should not write, “He cried” or “She wept.” He said that readers likely would laugh at me. I blushed and turned angry and said I didn’t care and cited poor dead Richard Hugo, who drove a Buick Roadmaster and tied his own trout flies. Hugo wrote in his book The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing that “Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute that writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality they got, the truer the art. That was a mistake.”

I am interested in tears. I am interested in what makes people cry. I know that you cry or that you sometimes wish that you could or, conversely, wish that you wouldn’t. I know that you sometimes laugh so hard that you cry. 1 am trying to write to that tender spot in you where your tears are.

I write what I want to read.

I wonder what we like so much about reading. Not the daily newspaper or the weekly newsmagazine or the Cheerios box, but the poem or essay, the short story or novel?

Maybe as a child you were bookish. Grown-ups opened their huge mouths and showed big square teeth and a long wet lavender tongue and waggled a bony index finger. Spittle showered as they urged you out of the sofa corner where you hid Charms five-flavor packets between cushions. You read and suckled the tart lime Charm while you followed pot-bellied Doctor Doolittle and his pushmi-pullyu, with its two heads, one head at the front of his body and another at the back (“No matter which way you came toward him, he was always facing you”). The finger-waggling grown-up chided you, said, “Get outside and smell the goddamn roses, kid.” The rose on the page smelled no less roseate (and certainly more glamorous, given its entanglement in plot) than the roses your grandmother caused with her endless fussing, her pruning and twisting the branches, to climb up the white arbor. The tight pink buds closed against your curiosity and bees guarded the open blossoms. The word “rose” on the page will be there when you return. You get as close as you want. You stick your nose down into it.

Words can seem more real than the things they name. Sometimes I am surprised I am not sitting on “chair” and gazing out through window’s six.

Remember when you were a little kid and played House or Cowboys or Soldiers or Cops-and-Robbers or maybe Doctor, the game that gave permission for lifting undershirts and peering into panties and tiny Jockey shorts? Remember how the games started? “Pretend this is our house and you are the Mom and I am the Grandma and Penny is the baby and Penny has been bad....” Or “Say that I’m the police and you’re the robber who is trying to break into the house and Barry’s the man who is asleep in the house and....” Remember how fast it started, the fall into belief in your story? Remember how, right away, you became the Mom who scolded that bad, bad baby, or the robber or the sleeping man stretched out on a bare patch of ground, snoring loudly while the robber, with exaggerated stealth, tiptoed toward your “house”? Remember how you did not notice that the temperature dropped ten degrees and the sun fell down behind late autumn’s leafless trees? Remember how, finally, you heard your mother’s voice calling you from beneath the golden light above your front porch? You hardly recognized her plangent alto cry, you hardly knew who it was she meant, as again and again, she sent your name trilling through chill twilight. You were not Penny or Barry. You were the bad baby or the man whose house was plundered. You were a blue-uniformed policeman, borne down by wide belt and heavy pistol and baton and flashlight and the need to right wrongs. “Dinner, dinner, dinnertime,” your mother called out. Your pistol that only seconds earlier streamed orange fire while you brayed, “Bang, bang, bang, bang,” dissolved into the stubby chunk of wood in your small sweaty hand. Your blue uniform evaporated. You were naked in your dungarees and Buster Brown T-shirt. You were you again, but different.

This fall into make-believe can feel like conversion feels to those who plunge forward during revival altar calls and fall on their knees as Kerouac did, before his borrowed desk. You quickly believe in Doctor or House. This fall, this tumble down into words on pages, also is a conversion experience. You believe in Heathcliff. You believe in his moors and the storm that blows over them. You believe in Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley, “as charming when she is drunk as when she is sober.” You want to carry her off over your shoulder and get her to AA.

It’s the rare writer who isn’t also a reader. Why do I want, why do you want, to walk into a world created by words when just outside the window, jacaranda trees drop blossoms onto the cracked sidewalk and stain the concrete an odd, squid-ink purple? Why do I, why do you, want the confected ocean when the actual wet Pacific is ten minutes away?

You will know what I’m saying here. You tuck into your overstuffed chair, a book in your hand. Let’s make believe the book is Kerouac’s On the Road (published finally in 1957, about 12 years after he wrote that sentence in blood) and let’s make believe that, for some reason, you’ve never before read it. The time is mid-afternoon. Sun shines down on the fig tree that occupies your side yard. (The jacaranda’s out front.) You gaze, for a moment, out the west-facing window that frames the fig tree. The tree’s leaves are dark green and wide enough, you think, to have covered Adam and Eve’s “shame.” You turn, then, to the dog-eared page where you’d left off, page 109 in the latest Penguin edition. Sal Paradise, the narrator, who in On the Road does all the things that in real life Jack Kerouac did, is saying, “It was a year before I saw Dean again. I stayed home all that time, finished my book and began going to school on the GI Bill of Rights.” Dean Moriarty, Sal’s friend in On the Road, does all the things that in real life Kerouac’s road-buddy Neal Cassady did. It’s Christmas time in the book, and Sal’s at his aunt’s house in Paterson, New Jersey, and Dean shows up and eventually they head to New Orleans to visit Ole Bull Lee, who in real life was William S. Burroughs. By page 135 they arrive in Washington, D.C., and it’s the day of Harry Truman’s inauguration. By page 140 they’re finally in New Orleans. “The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter. We bounced in our seats. ‘And dig her!’ yelled Dean, pointing at another woman. ‘Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!’ He spat out the window, he groaned; he clutched his head. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement and exhaustion.” A distant dog barks or your telephone rings. You glance up from the page. You look toward the window. The sun has begun its descent. The fig tree appears black and white. You feel chilly. The room is dim. You are squinting. Your stomach growls. You say, “1 don’t know where the time went.” You feel half in New Orleans with Sal and Dean, smelling mud and molasses, and half in your house, smelling what? I don’t know. Maybe it’s winter, and maybe you’re making vegetable soup with barley tossed in, and maybe the soup is thick by now, and you smell the simmering tomato and onion and carrot. But then again, maybe you can’t cook at all and your house is a mess and you smell the cat box you haven’t emptied and beer leaked out from the empty brown bottles on the floor. Maybe you haven’t bathed and you smell your own armpits.

I do know that when I am writing, it also happens to me. I will look up at the clock. I will see that two hours, three hours, have passed. I blink. One foot stands in what I’ve written and the other foot stands on my floor, where the day’s unread New York Times rests in its blue plastic wrapper. These wrappers are valuable to me, because 1 take them with me when I walk my dog and use them to pick up her wastes. Sometimes I am so deep down in what I am writing that I keep the blue wrapper and toss the Times, unopened, into the garbage can.

I think sometimes that if there’s a heaven and if we go there, we’ll discover that in heaven they don’t have clocks. I think that in heaven we will always be saying, with a big goofy grin on our big goofy faces, “I don’t know where the time went.” I think that phrase is one way to explain bliss.

There’s this phrase that I repeat to myself from Rilke: “Heart,” I say, “who will you cry out to?” You, who a minute ago were holding On the Road, that’s who. You are who I cry out to.

Maybe you’re a good talker. I’m not. I am too shy. I need time to gather my thoughts. I would not dare speak to you in the way that I write. I would never ever mention Rilke. I would not even mention his health problems and his interest in American cereals. Were we to meet, say, on a bench at the park, I would fall back on discussion about whether I might compliment the attractiveness of your dress. Maybe only once or twice, if that, have I gotten out of my mouth and into the ears of another person precisely what it is about which I am thinking and in the exact words in which I am thinking it. I am always falling short, in speech, of what I want to say. I am ashamed, embarrassed. I swallow what rides on the tip of my tongue.

You know how you talk, soundlessly, in your mind, with the beloved? You do what Helen Vendler (who has out a lovely and complicated new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets) describes as the “performance of the mind in solitary speech.” You feel that any moment your words will sing themselves. You imagine the words you would but cannot speak and always feel on the verge of speaking, and they are more aria, more Maria Callas coloratura than speech. But when you are actually with the beloved — let’s call him Mack, let’s make believe his hair is sandy-colored and brush cut and that the backs of his hands are freckled — what you in fact say is, “This is peculiar weather, isn’t it?” You point out the window at white clouds that pile and pile. Sandy-haired Mack, who is perhaps occupied by his own raw longings or who maybe only wants to get to the dry cleaners before they close and pick up his suits, does not turn to look at the clouds. Worse yet, you do that thing Mack really hates, and you complain about the neighbors and how they strew litter all across the alley and let their liver-spotted pointer run wild and the pointer lifts his leg and pees all over the stanchion that supports your mail box. Your hazel eyes (or your Robert Redford blue eyes) widen and your voice careens with nervousness and what you meant to mean to say stays unspoken, sticks in your throat like the needle-thin trout bone that one night almost choked you. What I am trying. always, to get down on paper is what you meant to say to Mack.

I’m never quite sure where, in me or in you, that we think and feel. We seem to speak rather interchangeably about “mind,” “heart,” “soul.” I, who don’t know much science, tend to think of the “place” of those activities — thinking and feeling — as a small box. I imagine this box rides along in the big ball of our head. This box sits up above our chattering teeth and sniffing nose and the webbed gold fat that pads our cheeks. Messages go out from that box into the meat that’s us. These discreetly whispered messages direct the movements made by our busy fleshy “cuts,” the chuck roasts and rib steaks and hams and assorted organ meats of you and me. When we die, this flesh that we’ve fed and exercised, lathered and shaved and perfumed and admired in mirrors will be offered as buffet for ants and beetles and flies. They will snack on you and on me. We worry all the time about dying and keep this worry to ourselves. It’s not polite to talk about it. Death spoils dinner.

The box is divided approximately in half by a shoji, the screen made from translucent rice paper that is used in Japanese houses as a partition between rooms. One half of the box houses the engine that allows me to do things like balance my checkbook and remember birthdays and buy the correct dog food brand for my dachshund and not forget to turn off the oven after I take out the angel food cake. Also in this first room is a memory bank. There, you keep both useful and not-so-useful information: the sun rises in the east and falls in the west; the turnip is a member of the mustard family; Beethoven wrote only one violin concerto; there is a Kansas City in Missouri as well as in Kansas and Kansas is where William S. Burroughs lived out the last years of his life and Missouri was where he was brn and his grandfather, also named William S. Burroughs, invented the adding machine, and it was William S. Burroughs, too, who gave Kerouac a copy of Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, the title of which in its original French is, I believe, Voyage au bout de la nuit. Kerouac went nuts over that book; I’ve tried to read it and can’t. Anyway, in this half of the box everything is fairly orderly and smells nice.

The box’s second “room,” slightly larger than the first, holds heart and soul. This room can get to looking and smelling like the last redoubt of an incontinent alcoholic homicidal banshee. When our feelings turn particularly chaotic, fumes from this room often swirl up around the shoji and muck up the engine that drives our flesh and the delicate memory bank; our hands tremble and we drop the iced tea glass and it shatters against the kitchen tiles and we forget where at the mall we parked the car, or worse yet, we lock the keys in the car. This heart-and-soul room can be a really bad and dangerous part of us. Feelings can send out poisonous juices that steep every cell in an ichorous marinade. We turn mean as a junkyard dog or so sad we say, “I think I will die from grief.” When we’re what we call “happy,” this heart-and-soul room’s all tidy and the sheets are clean and their spotless white cotton smells unforgettably of sunshine and June breezes and starch. I love to be happy.

High up on a shelf in this second room is a tiny box. It is in this box that our soul and its properties keep themselves. One of the soul’s properties are longings so deep we can barely say them to ourselves. These unspoken longings (like many of the prayers that issue from this same spot) describe themselves, if at all, in an inchoate grammar. They grunt and whine and keen. This tiny box that holds, among other things, these longings and this fear of dying that we don’t bring up in dinner conversation, also holds the part of us that puts pen to paper and nose in a book. It is that part of you, sitting here, that reads me. There’s no word in the dictionary that quite describes that part of you and me. At least I can’t find one.

Another way to say this is to quote Franz Kafka: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” You see this phrase on bookmarks that bookstores tuck into your purchases. It is from a letter that Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Poliak. We all have big frozen seas in the tiny box that sits in the round ball of our head. Big arctics. Frozen tears. We long to melt.

I had so much trouble writing this. I felt so foolish. I made false starts. I erased an entire section about how every time you sit down to read, you bring to that reading everything else you ever read. You bring what you read on the Cheerios box and you bring War and Peace and you bring Lady Brett. I erased a section that began with: “This is my letter to the world,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “that never wrote to me.” I copied down this, while I was reading: “The writer travels into the total dark of another’s soul.” When I went back through the books I’d read over the past month, I could never find that sentence again. But it sounds so true and is such a good description of what happens when we read.

Several times, I almost gave up. I fretted over how to get you interested in the question that interests me: why do we read? What do we like so much about reading? I still have not answered the question to my satisfaction or, surely, to yours. You will think of reasons other than those I’ve suggested that you like to read. I could have found your name and telephone number and dialed you up and asked you, “What is it you like so much about reading?” You could have told me. I would have enjoyed hearing you r voice and what you had to say. I might well have had something better, then, to write here.

I know, dear Reader, that this is embarrassing, is bad form, to speak to you so directly. I hope that you will forgive me. I hope that you will understand. Because now that I have done what I can do, now that I am almost through here, 1 realize that I am going to miss you. I loved glancing up from my notebook and seeing you, with these pages in your hands. I am glad, though, to be through here.

So now I have vanished. Now I am long gone. You look at what I’ve left here for you. Words on paper. It is your voice that reads these words. It is your tongue that tickles against the Ts and your lips that brush Bs. I want you to lick the page clean like a cat licks its kittens. I want the words that were mine last week to be your words now. I want you to forget where you read them.