Fully present, utterly connected : The Golden Age by Joan London

When I remember being a child and reading, I think first of sunlight, which I was always manoeuvring to be partly, though not wholly, in. This sunlight is always linked to quiet, to stillness. The sense of movement around me, but happening at a distance" my mother talking on the telephone (her voice louder as she strayed to the very end of the cord), or my sister using her sewing machine" the sort of movement that envelops you but allows you to be alone. The psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips, referring to D. W. Winnicott's essay 'The Capacity to be Alone' (1958), says that 'the goal for the child is to be alone in the presence of the mother. For a long time this has seemed to me to be the single best definition of reading'.