Three Stories and a Reflection, Patrick Suskind

"The old sickness has me in its grip again: amnesia litteris, the total loss of literary memory. I am overcome by a wave of resignation at the vanity of all striving for knowledge, all striving of any kind. Why read at all? Why read this book a second time, since I know that very soon not even a shadow of a recollection will remain of it? Why do anything at all, when all things fall apart? Why live, when one must die? And I clap the lovely book shut, stand up, and slink back, vanquished, demolished, to place it again among the mass of anonymous and forgotten volumes lined up on the shelf.

...

But perhaps - I think, to console myself - perhaps reading (like life) is not a matter of being shunted on to some track or abruptly of it. Maybe reading is an act by which consciousness is changed in such an imperceptible manner that the reader is not even aware of it."