I brought a book by Turgenev onto the plane with me, and started reading it, and, as I did so, I recalled how the main character in a different novel, The Sun Also Rises, reads the very same work of fiction one night, in a hotel in Pamplona, after drinking all day with his companions, after watching the unloading of the bulls at the corral, before the corrida, so that when he gets back to his room, and begins to undress for bed, the walls seem to be spinning, and he thinks to himself how, in the morning, though he is enjoying the Turgenev now, and admiring the way the Russian seems to have constructed the countryside, so that one feels as though one might walk right into it, or as if one was in it already, instead of wherever one happens to be, he will not remember what of it he has read, though somewhere in his consciousness he will have absorbed it.