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”Who knows him, this youth who’s let his face sink down from his own existence to a second one, which only the quick turning of full pages sometimes violently interrupts?

Even his mother would not be sure it’s he who sits there reading something saturated with his shadow. And we, who have hours, how can we know how much of him was lost

before with effort he looked up; raising himself all that inhered in the book’s depths, with eyes which, instead of taking, bumped givingly into the full-finished world:
the way quiet children, who have played alone,
suddenly experience what’s at hand;
but his features, which were in order,
remained forever recomposed.”

The Reader, Rilke