we begin reading early and we often read much too much, so that we receive and retain large amounts of material without putting it into employment and our memory becomes accustomed to keeping open house for taste and feeling; this being so, we often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and i might almost say to exist ourselves.

g.c.lichtenberg,
the waste books. 

i'm discomfited by collecting things that tend to exist for themselves and to speak among themselves about me in whispers yet i keep getting books that i often 
don't read so that they will do that among themselves and include me as a book they might in a sense live with or dwell alongside. 
if i can't actually read them i hope to absorb their atmospheres, and their community, when i come home and fall into my daybed trance.