Passages

‘A friend, a very good friend,’ he said dreamily. ‘She was so eloquent I remember, explained so beautifully what I felt about that passage, about Maggie. We felt nearness to some passages, she said. They gave us succor, delight, a rousing of anger, a feeling of grief. They were the mason of dreams. Sometimes we passed by them without noticing their beauty, as a person looking for loved ones on a train docked in the station might pass running by their window without more than a glance, his mind consumed by the very desire to find them, disturbed by the joy of anticipation that filled his heart. But often, if we read slowly, the strokes on the paper would remove themselves from their sleeping nests, from their flat world of black and white, whirl up into the air and get transformed into iridescent objects, into frisson of emotions. Through such wizardry had a man once turned moonlight into a dove’s gift to the moon; another had turned the moon itself into a luminous clock; a woman had found bulbs of silvery music rolled inside a lark. They waved the wand of their muse and the letters curled into one another, making us see the bluest lake ever imagined, hear the sweetest song ever sung, kiss the softest lips ever kissed.’