Just as Laurence Sterne’s white page invites the reader to pause, to take refuge from the narrator’s words in what might seem an eddy of silence, doesn’t every space on a page of writing offer an exit, or even an escape, from the author’s voice? But we do not seek refuge in silence when we stop reading; we simply mute the nattering voice that interrupts our own babbling consciousness, or, more generously perhaps, we resolve the duet of two contending voices into our own aria that can scale heights without interruption by, for example, the garrulous Mr. Shandy.

Or by me. Surely the reader has lifted his or her eyes from the pages just read in this very book to consider with no little skepticism the judgments I have asserted about the representation of silence. Is reading a silent debate, then, one that we enter and from which we constantly withdraw to consider the author’s argument and our conclusions about its validity?

But not all reading is this kind of duel, a dialogue of thrust and parry. Swept along by a compelling narrative and well-crafted sentences, who has not been lost in another’s consciousness only to be startled back into the moment by a ringing phone or some other interruption? And actually wasn’t the reading itself the interruption, at least of our own sense of self, and the knock at the door the slap that awakened us from a kind of dream?

Like walkie-talkies that require a button be pressed to speak and released to hear, does reading require that either the voice of the author or the voice of the reader’s consciousness be silenced at any given moment? Such an analogy suggests that reading is an act of hospitality toward another’s mind, in which we silence our voice in courtesy to the voice of another’s consciousness, a voice that alternates with our own in conversation.

But what happens when circumstances demand the complete attention of one’s consciousness? Won’t the ink on the page remain mute stains unless the reader has the breath to plump them into words and the attention to reinvigorate the thoughts those silent letters preserve? To read, must consciousness be at its leisure to admit the voice of another? Or put another way, will a preoccupied mind refuse to be silenced long enough to read? And so is reading at least an intermittent silencing of the self, a silence intolerable when that self is under threat?