[dba-SQLServer] Open a text file from SQL Server

Can someone tell me how to open a text file from SQL Server? And place 
its contents into a memory variable? I'm looking at OPENXML but all its 
examples use text that is assigned to a variable from within the 
example, rather than read in from an XML or just a text file. It looks 
like full text search will do it, but that's a lot of install overhead 
just to read in a file. Is there a simpler way?

TIA,
Arthur