He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is ind… - Vladimir Nabokov

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our
spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of
artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship
the spine and its tingle.

Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the centre vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.

Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad
Plump in the middle of a busy road,
Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,
Or a book mite in a revived divine.