I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public — that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.
Same.