Laborers and voyagers: From the text to the reader

Farfrom being writers-founders of their own place, heirs to the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses-readers are voyagers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way acrossfields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Writing accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a place and multiplies its production through the expansionism of reproduction. Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), reading does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost paradise. -Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life