That's the thing about books. They're alive on their own terms. Reading is like travelling with an argumentative, unpredictable good friend. It's an endless open exchange.

[Woolf] explores the way reading – whether the reading of texts or the semiotic reading of other people from their appearance – involves bridging or otherwise negotiating gaps in information, reconstructing from hints, ‘not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done’ (Jacob's Room 24) to create something of greater consistency, of great constancy, in the process of ‘making a whole’.

In effect, it is impossible to interpret a work, literary or otherwise, for and in itself, without leaving it for a moment, without projecting it elsewhere than upon itself. Or rather, this task is possible, but then the description is merely a word-for-word repetition of the work itself. It espouses the forms of work so closely that the two are identical. And, in a certain sense, every work constitutes its own best description.