Growing up, I heard the notion that the act of reading books sucks you into each of the worlds found within the pages of each respective book. That idea sounds truly wonderful on the outset. We get drawn into a world that is so completely different from ours (presumably to escape from our own reality for a short while) and are given a tour of said world as a pivotal point in their history is unfolding around us and then
KABOOM!
We're uncermoniously shoved, hurled, dropped, washed up, or any number of other ways of being hastily expelled, (the emphasis is on the uncermoniousness of it) back into our very real world just as we take in the last punctuation mark of the story. If we're lucky, we've picked a book that has a sequel or several, and we can plunge ourselves back into the world soon thereafter. If we've picked up a stand-alone book, our only option is to stagger about in our thoughts for a bit, reeling from the expulsion as we take in all of what we have just experienced through the reading of that particular book. Suddenly, the idea of being sucked into a story is not so appealing, right? Are there any other options for expressing how we experience books? Yes, I have a proposal for alternate way we can view our connection to books.
Here is my proposal:
Each time a person learns to read, they gain what I am going to call their "wings of paper"*. With these "wings", the person goes to and from every book that they will ever read in their life, but as they leave each story, a word, phrase, scene, theme, ect., from that story gets imprinted on their wings, forever leaving their mark, whether good or bad, small or big. Some books, I imagine, would contribute to the wearing down of the wings, while other books would help to repair any previous damage or would add a splash of color to them.
Why wings? Well, I've latched onto the imagery because wings allow their bearer to sail through the air, above the happenings of the world below them, unaffected, if they wish, but wings also help their bearer to alight onto a landmark protruding from the ground (think mountain, tree, bush, ect.) or onto the ground itself. In relation to reading book, we can choose to fly over books by reading a summary and deciding that we don't want to read the book and get a complete picture of the storyline, or we can decide that, yes, this book sounds like an interesting read and we are going to read it. Then we would "land" and begin our trek through the story. Of course, there is always the possibilty that we will decide to fly off from the story before we've made it all the way through the journey that has been laid out by the book's author, and as I myself have learned recently, that is perfectly fine. As readers, we are not obligated to finish every literary journey we embark upon.
I would like to share now some of the things I would say are on my wings of paper:
The word "journey". I think I've explained enough on this blog site about what the motif of journeys means to me, so I won't beat a dead horse by explaining it yet again, but rather I shall encourage you to read any of my other blog posts that seem like they might explore it in depth.
a. Also, the image of inky footprints which goes with the journey motif, but which is also a concept that is close to my heart in its own right.
The image from King Lear of the Earl of Gloucester's eyes being stomped and dug out from his eye sockets. I made the mistake of reading that part 3 times when I first read the play. The second and third reads of that scene were because I didn't understand what I read the first time and then I was horrified at what I thought I'd read the second time and was hoping I'd misunderstood. After the third time, I berated myself for emblazoning that image forever on my mind (and on my literary wings)
"I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope that I have made them right" (Zusak 528) and "Words! Words! Words!". The latter is a modified version of a quote from Hamlet with the commas in the original being replaced with exclamation marks in order to convey excitement on my part.* These quotes have been formative for me as I think about my passion for words. Now, I would say that I am a logophile-- a lover of words, but that doesn't I love words with every inhale and exhale of breath I take. Like Lisel in The Book Thief, I've had my times when I've wished that my vocation wasn't so tightly tied to the stewardship of words. However, even if I am in a season of disliking my vocation, I will always have the desire to make the words "right".
The illustrations from Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Seriously, the story is fantastic, but I honestly think more about how masterfully done the illustrations were, rather than the storyline itself.
Flecks of vomit from every time I've mentally thrown up after reading scenes that were exorbitantly T.M.I. (Sorry SJM/ACOTAR fan club, I'm not one of you.)
"World War II". One of my favorite genres to read historical fiction and I particularly love the stories set during World War II. I think it is the fact that the heroes/heroines of the stories are always put in positions of having to stand up to evil and it usually happens in their ordinary lives, not on the battlefield. These books are always a great reminder to me that some of the greatest acts of bravery in history went unnoticed because they were accomplished by the ordinary Sallies and Joes of their times who were *just* living out their convictions in the face of great evil.
What words, phrases, and pictures are on your wings of paper? Write any that you can think of in the comments because I would love to hear about them!
*1.I suppose it could happen even earlier, perhaps when they first encounter books, most likely through books being read to them.
*2.This makes an interesting study on the power of punctuation marks in communicating tone, because in the original text, Hamlet is lamenting the emptiness of words, which is the opposite of what I want to convey.
Works Cited
Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.