The gesture of receiving light must be so elemental and individual, you cannot entirely transmute the secret to another. All we can do is wish that the other may be able to feel its glimmer. Representation Pic/Thinkstock

Lately I have begun to mis-read words, as if exhibiting symptoms of mild dyslexia. I’d initially excused this increasingly recurrent behaviour as the consequence of being overworked, of editing multiple publications besides my own writing and my own textual research. But the discrepancies have begun to assume an almost poetic demeanour. For example, when, yesterday, I reopened my copy of Stigmata by the French feminist, Helene Cixous, I made my way through her first essay, ‘Bathsheba or the Interior Bible’, which is a beatific meditation on Rembrandt’s 1654 painting Bathsheba bathing, and soon misread this line: