I was in Nashville last night for a speech today, and lucky for me it was a night that Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell and Vince Gill were playing a benefit concert for the Epilepsy Foundation. I took a cab to the Mercy Lounge, bought a ticket, and listened as America poured itself into our soul.

Our relationship to readers reading in our presence is awkward. The reader is mysterious. She sends few physical cues of the sort we search for, consciously and unconsciously, in others. We abhor a lack of information about those in our midst, so we fill in the blanks. Seeing a reader alone in a restaurant, for instance, some no doubt think, “The poor soul must be lonely.” The reader, though, has ten thousand friends.