Distant Star and In the Heart of the Country

I turn up the pages in books I read. And, as I read, I wonder what small collection of letters, what thought, or sentence, or paragraph captured the attention of the previous reader, the uknown known. I follow in their path, seeing trail markers and ignoring them, avoiding in my mind the certainty that their fingers have touched these same pages, eyes passed over these same words. We are intimates, the previous reader and I, without ever knowing it we are closer than the person who I sit next to on the bus, and if I met that previous reader, man or woman, young or old, I am certain that we could sit down over coffee and pastries and talk about how quickly the world passes us by.

Distant Star by Roberto Bolano

"A few strands of cloud appeared in the sky, which half an hour earlier had been absolutely clear. Drifting east, shaped like cigarettes or pencils, the clouds were black and white at first, when they were still over the coast, but as they veered towards the city they turned pink, then bright vermillion as they headed up the valley.
For some reason I had the impression I was the only prisoner looking at the sky. It might have had something to do with being nineteen years old."

I have turned up all the pages now, only this one excerpted above remains, tracing my own path through that same book, but the ghostly outlines of the previous reader's pages remain, like late summer light in the leaves of green trees.

In the Heart of the Country by William Gass

"I dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river. I'd follow a vein with the point of my finger, hold your bare feet in my naked hand."

"Billy closes his door and carries coal or wood to his fire and closes his eyes, and there's simply no way of knowing how lonely and empty he is or whether he's as vacant and barren and loveless as the rest of us are--here in the heart of the country."

"The shad is ample, the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are heavy and red, teh roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and with the russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool who wanted, blessed with this, to love anywhere else in the world."

"The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection."

"That fall leaves had burned themselves out on the trees, the leaf lobes had curled, and now they flocked noisily down the street and were broken in the wires of my rake."