Literature

In the book’s second chapter, “The Reader,” she observes that “it is equally important, to the understanding of the poem, not to read at all.” Why? What is the power of this empty space, this absence of mind, this not-reading that reading provokes in us?

For Woolf, what a reader attains by not reading is “that state of mind in which it seems possible to us to write the book, not to read it.”