ABSTRACT
I am interested in the story of how we come to love stories. For many of us, this story began in the moments we were read to as young children. After all, being immersed in a book is itself a kind of story, since the experience writes itself as a memory that is both distinct from and yet always folding into the story on the page. Residing within us, this story-in-a-story is more a collage than a narrative. This story, it turns out, is about machinery—the machinery of language, of imagination, of intimacy. Moreover, as we grow, we understand it to be the story of how we came to operate these different forms of machinery with success. Enhanced sometimes by pictures and always by the rhythms of the reader’s voice and his comfortably close self, this metamoment becomes a particularly nostalgic one for lovers of stories.
