In reading you don't look at the words you look through them. That's not quite right. You don't see the words but you also don't see something else on the other side of them as if they were a window - wrong metaphor. You do something with the words which prompts your thinking, and you can only do that thing, whatever it is, by looking at the words in a certain way, scanning them in a certain way, but without seeing them as such. You can only do this when the words are invisible, but if the words suddenly blanked out you would be shocked out of your thoughts. This is a bit deceptive because you can instantaneously switch back and forth from seeing the words to reading them, so you might believe you see them. Furthermore the thoughts which the words prompt in you are not contained in the words, were not put into them by the writer of the words, but something like it. If reading was replaying the writer's thoughts as on a tape-recording then you'd understand nothing, they have to be your own thoughts, but sculpted by the words in such a way that you can return to them and revise the sculpture. There is a sense of the fit between the shapes you make in your own thoughts and the shapes pressed into the words, a sense of the gap, of the fit - as if you model the words, abduct them. None of this is any different from just thinking, from any of your continuing thinking processes at any level. That is, they are as if read, so that there is a sensory track which needs to be present even though it is not in attention. This might consist just of inner body sensations or of these and something more. Subtle modulations of bodily feeling anchor thought; you read your inner life into them in the same way as you read the scenarios of dreams into the sensations that arise in your sleeping body. All thought is like this, even the the most abstract thought that comes closest to framing the thinking process. They are not exactly bodily sensations because what you know as the body is itself already a product of thought. Perhaps it is like the hum of being.