writing as reading? #1

“If you do not know what reading can be, you might as well use the pages of the Iliad for the purpose for which newspaper is used after a meal in the woods [by Thoreau, who wrapped his bread in newspaper and read it after eating]. If, however, you are prepared to read, then a fragment of newspaper, discovered words, are sufficient promptings, bespeaking distant and kindred lives and deaths. The events in a newspaper, our current lives, are epic, and point morals, if we know how to interpret them. The words of the Iliad should come to us as immediately as election results or rumors of war.” (Stanley Cavell: Senses of Walden, 1972: 67)

(“One can say that newspapers, incapable of seizing the insignificance of the everyday, are able to render its value apprehensible only by declaring it sensational; … The everyday escapes.”)
(Maurice Blanchot: Infinite Conversation [1969] 2003: 243-244)

“As the writer must establish or create his mode of presence to the word, he must admit or create the reader’s mode of presence to it. It is the ground upon which they will meet.” (Cavell 1972: 61).