Did You Ever

. . . have that experience where you’re rereading something you haven’t read in a long time, like Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 for instance, and as you read something touches your memory about a passage that once moved you very deeply, but you can’t remember anything else about it, only that it’s there, up ahead somewhere, and so you read on, but as you read the not-remembered passage pulls at you and begins to take shape, limned by solitary words that loom out of the passing text like milemarkers in the headlights, telling you you’re close, almost there now almost there, giving the almost-not-remembered passage color, contour, until you feel you could recall it if you wanted to but you don’t because what you really want is to feel like you’re reading it for the first time when you get there, and then—just like that—you are and you do, like “other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of copper wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.”