Risk. Danger. These are certainly not the words that come to mind when thinking about reading and writing, nor the pangs of anxiety one tends to associate with these words. But the writings of the late sixteenth-century Michel de Montaigne and the early twentieth-century Virginia Woolf express and enact the significance of the intimacy between reader and writer – between reader and text. Both were intensely interested in what ensues when one brings one's self, in all its mystery and mutability, to meet another self, as it is embodied in their carefully chosen words and punctuation, deftly arranged on the page. What is the risk of following a mind moving along varying trajectories, venturing to places unknown? It suggests a voyage for both writer and reader, taking both to uncharted territories. The words they encounter dredge up unconscious scenarios, produce physiological responses, and provoke many feelings that simply defy anticipation or control.