Lisa Robertson’s roman-fleuve of reading and stolen time – Claire Foster
"The primary pleasure for a readerof Robertson is always in thinking about reading, and for Lucy, her readerly pleasure is 'in pausing. I noted and ruffled every tiny texture as it arose, whether in my mental sensation of reading, or in my body as I cellularly assimilated the words . . . I was reading my body.' My reading heart turned soft as one of Lucy’s rags upon meeting this passage that begins as a description of duration and blooms into an ethics of love:
I tried to linger with my amorous incomprehension, to slow my attention so as to better savour the most intricate linguistic constructions and transitions as well as their attendant desiring states, which, love-like, kept shifting. With this hard-won slowing came the conviction that to truly savour a book, to savour love . . . one could not read slowly enough. The waking world must be replaced with love. The experience of duration became its own mystical pleasure. Did love ever arrive? Poetry arrived, and what is the difference.
