Reading is really reincarnation

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, on reading: “Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we are reborn into more ample and generous minds. ‘Life piled on life / Were all too little,’ says Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses,’ and he is right. Given the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once?”