Guess.

Wyeth, N.C., Imagination, 1921

The alchemists have a saying: Tertium non datur, "The third is not given." That is, the transformation from one element into another, from waste matter into best gold is a mystery, not a formula. No one can predict what will form out of the tensions of opposites and effect a healing change between them. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a free and vast plain without any movement at all. Something new has entered the process. We can only guess.

Jeanette Winterson, from "Orion"

Roam.

Reading was not so important to my working-class community, unless it was the Bible.  Reading the Bible means that you can read anything else -- and it makes Shakespeare easy because the language of the King James version is also the language of Shakespeare.  We had a strong oral tradition in the north of England, and people often forget that not being able to read, or not reading, even fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago, was very different from not reading now.

We live in a 24/7 saturation bombing from enervated mass media and a bogus manufactured popular culture.  If you don't read you will likely be watching telly, or on the computer, or listening to fake music from puppet-show bands.  

When the families I knew in my northern textile town didn't read -- and they didn't -- they were in the brass band, or in the choir, telling their own stories down the pub or on the greyhound track, finding the quiet pleasure of mending kit or working the allotment, or walking for miles in  the Pennines.  I am not glamorising this working-class life; it was hard and short, and I could not stay there and I would not want it back.  But it had a genuine culture of its own -- roots up --and it was not force-fed adverts, consumerism and The X Factor.

The Living Mountain is the need to be physical, to be in the body, and to let the senses and the soul work in harmony with the mind.  This seems a long way from lying in bed and reading a book.  But it isn't far at all.

Reading stills the body for a while, allowing rest without torpor and quiet without passivity.  Reading is not a passive act.  Engaged in the book, in company with the writer, the mind can roam where it will.  Such freedom to roam reminds us that body and mind need exercise and activity, and that neither the mind nor the body can cope with confinement.  And if the body has to cope with confinement, then all the more reason to have developed a mind that knows how to roam.

Jeanette Winterson, from "A Bed. A Book. A Mountain.," the afterward to Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain

Curiously.

I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.

Jeanette Winterson