Pleasure Of The Text (Part Two)

Another great quote from Barthes’ The Pleasure Of The Text.  This is the best summary of the writerly text, and romance, I have ever read:

To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work.  Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.  I am not necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand.  (24)