Why did he keep it? Why was it still, as always, tucked into his bag?
Because of the quote, written inside opposite the contents page maybe.
"The essence of all knowledge is the question of retrieval of feeling and purpose,
lost with the dead. It ought to be our desire to recover, not only to retain,
but to bring back to life an unending, which presence declines to survive."
That passage struck a nerve with Rowley. When he read it, he always had a clear impression of his mother's face in his mind's eye, and usually not otherwise. He had
come to believe that she had sent it to him, that it had been given up by the sea
at his feet, for him alone to find, as if the 'Other Side' was another continent on the opposite side of the sea, that it had been catapulted out, dry and without water stains, after a sea-born journey impressed him profoundly. He thought of the oceans, not as water
any more, but as ethereal, immaterial, and a sort of wireless transmitter from that Other Side, wherever that was. A book which in itself barely fitted into the palm of his adolescent hand, with its dingy brown cover and almost illegible golden embossed title, a book whose contents appeared to relate to the most unusual - for want of a better word -
experimental sciences.........
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