What if the space into which a book is opened determines the story that it conjures? If this is true, then it means your place in the world shapes a book even as a book shapes you.
Last Sunday, I reread Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, in two sittings. I read the first half outside, the morning sun gaining strength as it climbed the back of my neck and head, tendrils of steam from my coffee wisping away in my peripheral vision. I got about halfway, had to put it down, and I returned to my seat in the backyard after dinner, where I finished with the sun now levelling at my eyes.
Point Omega is a ponderable, cryptic book that demands quiet introspection. The bulk of the slim volume is set in the desert, with the verbal and physical interactions of its characters mapping a kind of philosophical treatise on space and time, loss and trauma. I had read it before, but this time reading it in the open air amplified its strange power, its disorienting effects.
It is a book about quiet, and distance, and heat, and stillness, and so as I sat quietly in the open air, underneath a cloudless sky and a burgeoning sun, the words I lifted off the page ran through my head and also through the little world around me, so that the book and my head and the little world — the blue sky, the sun, the cedars, the birdcalls, the garden hose burping as it filled the childrens’ wading pool…
