If Justice Takes Place, There May Be

As Centuries Of Dictators Have Known, An Illiterate Crowd Is The Easiest To Rule; Since The Craft Of Reading Cannot Be Untaught Once It Has Been Acquired, The Second-best Recourse Is To Limit Its Scope.

I Had A Library Of Maybe 1,000 Books In My Room In Buenos Aires. I Did Have The Sense That Everything There Was Organised In The Right Way. You'll Probably Think I Needed Serious Psychiatric Treatment, But There Were Times When I Would Not Buy A Book Because I Knew It Wouldn't Fit One Of The Categories Into Which I Had Divided The Library.

The Listeners Who Buy Books After A Reading Multiply That Reading; The Author Who Realizes That He Or She May Be Writing On A Blank Page But Is At Least Not Speaking To A Blank Wall May Be Encouraged By The Experience, And Write More.

Readers Are Bullied In Schoolyards And In Locker-rooms As Much As In Government Offices And Prisons.

Through Ignorance, Through Faith, Through Intelligence, Through Trickery And Cunning, Through Illumination, The Reader Rewrites The Text With The Same Words Of The Original But Under Another Heading, Re-creating It, As It Were, In The Very Act Of Bringing It Into Being.