Reading and its rituals became acts of resistance; as the Italian psychologist Andrea Devoto noted, “everything could be treated as resistance because everything was prohibited.”

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Manguel Devoto The Library at Night reading rituals acts resistance everything resistance because everything prohibited

Consider also:

  1. “I roll over and put my arms around Jesse, we hold each other tenderly and rock in the sun. Jesse pushes into me slowly, wet and silky, lies against me with one leg between mine, his body and the sun one embrace touching and awakening me.”
  2. “In this ‘Closed Museum or Hidden Library’ are many strange volumes and curious objects”
  3. “Soon, you remember only what it wants you to remember.”
  4. “Rather, what may seem to be mystification is a way of making that information symbolic because it is hidden. Because it is hidden, it cannot be explained. Because it cannot be said, it stands in for, or acts as a pointer to, the unsayable. We map the extra, tacit, inarticulable dimension into the ordinary realm by the use of secrets. Or: the secret is the diagonal that allows the third, inarticulate dimension to be mapped into the plane, the domain of words.”
  5. “since he had read the Word, the Word was now lodged inside him, even if he had not met the Author; that he had become the Book, the Word made flesh, through that little bit of the divine that the craft of reading allows to all those who seek to learn the secrets held by a page.”