And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in
front of him. As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I
trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future
were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read
the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in text and
drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and
self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and
unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established
contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas
of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a
short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading
those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawja where he had got them he said
something that astonished me even more.
-- Milorad Pavic "Dictionary of the Khazars" (female version: p. 293)