A Snippet of 2009.

I read on the train. I very rarely read anywhere else. If I do it is probably on a bus - so most of my reading happens in a moving environment.

But most of it, almost all of it, happens on the Metropolitan Line between Baker Street and Uxbridge. I have become used to the rocking and shaking of my seat, of the whole carriage, as I read. It is a comfort like being in a pram, a cot, or a mother’s arms. Rocked back and forth in the mother’s arms, the first dance of life, the baby’s first taste of rhythm. My deity mother shakes the train as I slumber fitfully in my bookdreams.

Yes, reading is a kind of sleep. Reading is receding from the world, forgetting the body and ones surroundings. Yielding to the dream of the text. In my comforting commute, as my zooming pram shakes away my woes, I read and read. Woken only by the terminated train, whose unprecedented stillness, and whose long loud hiss, speak of a tired and reposeful deity who wishes for some rest herself. No more rockabybaby, time to get up. And so the day starts as the book ends. Like any child I mourn this departure from comfort.