essays · cloth-bound · the shelf above the reading lamp
twenty-two short essays, none longer than three pages. each
begins in the half-hour after a lamp has been turned on and
before the eye has adjusted. the writer holds that this
particular interval — neither dusk nor
proper night — produces a kind of sentence that cannot be
produced under any other condition, and that most of the
sentences worth keeping are produced then.
she writes about objects that come forward in low light: the
pale edge of a window frame, the
surface of a mirror when the room is
darker than it is, the unexpected white of the inside of a
cupboard. she writes about people who only speak in such
light, and people who refuse to.
the book is short. it is meant, the foreword says, to be read
only at the hour it describes, and only one essay at a time.
marginalia · pencil, in a different hand i have read this book three times and never finished it. the lamp keeps being switched off.