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In a brilliant evocation of the rapture of reading, Wallace Stevens has described with compelling accuracy the experience of anyone who has ever come under the thrall of a powerful illusion:
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page …
The absolute empathy between the reader and the book, the way in which the reader's surroundings, the quiet calm of the summer night, become part of the reality of the book and bear witness to its truthfulness and perfection, all help to recreate that ecstatic state in which the world, the reader and the book become one. We have seen that many moralists, critics and writers of Golden-Age Spain took a much less sanguine view of the captivation induced by reading, and set about ensuring that the powerful illusions of literature at least were made safe if they could not be suppressed altogether.
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