We dream of him and in the morning we tell each other our dreams where he is living with us again, fixing salads, whistling, standing in doorways. Our mother tells us there was a time before they thought to marry when he wrote her every day, long letters with a date and a time in the upper right corner, the hour always late and the pages sometimes stained purple by wine that had spilled as he lifted the glass and drank while he wrote … Our mother says not to throw the letters out, they are all that’s left of the love she’ll never feel again.

You sometimes feel that reading books is the only way you can think, as if the reading occupied one part of your brain and this allowed the other part to go free and become more active. You need that time to read in order to think. That’s all there is to it.