Within every book secrets are revealed, but there are deeper treasures buried beneath what you see. The book is a solid thing you can hold. The story is a sparking, fleeting experience daring you to give chase and to catch fire.
A story is a progression through possibilities, a dense connection of ideas that ignites new electrical connections in your brain, tripping switches, releasing dopamine, letting tears slip and laughter burst. You create worlds with the author, meeting the writer’s mind amid the small words to share great visions. You are not simply decoding the language on the page. In reading, you open hidden portals to new variables: Data, information, knowledge, wisdom, lies, truth, lies that tell the truth, experience and, ultimately, choice.
Books offer novelty, chance, escape, distraction, transcendence, freedom and stimulation like no other art. Books are a uniquely cooperative, requiring a deft weaver, yes, but also an audience willing to be gentle. Readers are dance partners. Lose yourself in the movement. Let go of counting one-two-three, one-two three. Instead, look in your dance partner’s eyes and embrace them. Enjoy the dance. Hold tight. Hold so tight you let go.
Promise: You will be transported through space, whirled in time and transformed with emotion, but you will always waking in your own bed, deposited where you began and a little regretful you aren’t in Oz anymore. It’s okay. When you come back, you aren’t you anymore. You never walk through the same door twice and remain unchanged.
For those doors you choose to open? Walk through, tread lightly and learn how to live from people who have never lived. Meet and be among characters with whom you would never dare to speak. You will witness terrible examples of how to interact in reality (…whatever that is. Imagination is a much clearer path.) Through the heroes and heroines you meet, you will know pain and loss, sacrifice and triumph. Stories are the matrix of our desires, fears and dreams. Books are simulations and wise guides, asking you to draw your own conclusions.
Your mind evolved with your bare feet in the cold dirt, haunches aching, as you basked in the heat of the campfire. Amid the smell of burning meat, you listened to soaring legends about the milky pearls shining and reaching down from the black infinite. You listened to tales of the hunt and, in telling your own stories of bravery, searching and loss, reached up to touch the infinite. We tell stories to illuminate the darkness.
The careful words we pull to ourselves in the form of books are comforts in a world where, elsewhere, words are casual weapons. In the patient future, you will lie upon an overstuffed couch under a cozy blanket by your fireplace, listening to a storm’s rage and, gratefully, you will disappear into a book. Stories are journeys through mythology, revisited for the depth of our common visceral experience, touched on repeatedly to remind ourselves we are thinking, reaching, grasping animals.
The most valuable treasures slip in when you are sleeping in the reader’s trance. Meditate on theme. A book yields more than what you read. A book is a still lake on a warm summer day: Watch the rippling wind write on its surface; spot fish darting beneath in cool water; see your reflection; stretch your awareness up to the ponderous turn of clouds; lift yourself beyond, back to the infinite. Think. Reach. Grasp.
Books are valuable because they reach into your mind and become part of who you are. Our books are ourselves. The mind does not distinguish between reality and fantasy. You know this is true of dreams, your fears and what you read. I am a writer, giving you the bones of the structure of a world. You fill in the rest, seeing my broad brushstrokes in minute detail.
Your mind is a magnificent camera that runs on black-and-white words. Your camera does not simply record my words. You are much more important than that. Your camera co-creates in color. No two writers write the same story. A secret: No two readers draw the same word pictures from one writer. Reading is creation, too.
Books are more special than we recognize because they are no longer rare. Were novels new, they would not possess mere novelty. They would be seen as powerful. Books release staggering magic from within you, a fire once lit that must be fed.
I am a whisper in your mind. Thank you for letting me in. Amplify my words and make their thunder shake the everyday world away. Hold my book in your hands, enter the story and feel electricity’s hum. I am lightning on the horizon of your consciousness. Through this curious magic, I will meet you there. I will become you.
This is the only divinity I know.