Aphorisms
Essays About

The Reader as Extrovert

A reader's days would seem dull to someone watching from outside. I read, think about my reading, and write about my thinking. I spend hours in chairs, staring at pages or screens, not speaking, hardly moving. The audience would wonder if I were alive. The life is inside: a reader's outward calm belies a mind in motion. We are wrong to think of readers as introverts. Readers are secret extroverts who crave constant society, only they crave it with novelists, philosophers, and poets, not their neighbors. They traverse distant worlds and interview the dead, while the so-called socialites never leave the local scene, homebodies of the here and now.

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