Three Magic Powers of Readers

I can talk to ghosts. I also have a time machine which enables me to travel into the distant future. How far it goes, even I don’t know. I’m also telepathic. I can project carefully shaped thoughts from my own mind into yours.

 

Am I the chosen one in an epic young adult fantasy novel?

 

As much as I enjoy reading, and writing such fantasies, the answer is no. The truth is that you have these magical powers as well. Any literate person does. Reading enables us to converse with the ghosts of men and women who died centuries, even millennia, ago. Rating enables us to share our thoughts by bouncing them off a paper or screen, sending them mind to mind. We can even send out thoughts across spacetime, to share with people on the other side of the world or even with generations who will not be born for many centuries, or millennia to come.

 

Writing is, of course, just one form of media, and new forms of media are being invented all the time. In the future, realistic holograms, looking very much like the ghosts out of legend, might be able to converse interactively with ordinary people, bringing writings to life in a whole new way.

 

Writing is also a great equalizer. Unlike in politics, wherein who you get to talk to depends on who you know personally, anyone who can read and write can carry on conversations with great minds from the past and future and across the world.

 

There are some obstacles to the sharing of information through writing. 

 

One is transmission. Books from the past must be transmitted to the future. That means that generations of readers and collectors must care enough about the writings to preserve, collect, and distribute them, or at least to preserve them in carefully maintained collections. 

 

Two is translation. Writing reflects our language, which comes attached to different cultures which have each evolved their own set of interlocking symbols to communicate. Before the Arabs, Persians and Europeans of the Dark Ages could unlock the thoughts of Greek and Roman philosophers, they first had to either study the languages of the ancients or translate them into their own modern languages. As technology makes translation more and more affordable and accessible to the ordinary person, translation becomes less and less of a barrier.

 

Three is accessibility. If a book is only preserved in an isolated library in a remote nation, one that does not allow anyone to visit or read the book, it’s going to be hard to access that information. If books and magazines and research articles are locked behind an excessive paywall, only those who are both wealthy and motivated will be able to share in the information.

 

Libraries were invented to overcome all three of these problems. But even if we could create a huge global cyber library, free and accessible and translated into a lingua franca for all, we would still have one remaining problem, which cannot be overcome.

 

The final problem is that there are always going to be more books to read than any one person can read in a lifetime. This was true even in the Dark Ages when there were barely a few hundred thousand books in existence. It’s even more true today.

 

We have to realize, then, that each of us, through our choices of reading, becomes a living library, in and of ourselves. Our mind becomes the temporary repository of a unique collection of books, chosen by us over a lifetime. No other reader will have chosen to have read exactly the same assortment of books as I have or that you have. We are each unique, living, walking, talking libraries.

 

(Much of what I say about books now also applies to movies and video games, which have, in my opinion, made the whole species smarter as a result, since not everyone likes reading much; but I’ll continue to use books as my example. Be aware it applies to other media too.)

 

Whenever I read a book, I compare it with other books I have read. I try to integrate the knowledge and experience of the new book with the knowledge and experience is I gained from previous books. This creates a unique gestalt. I do this more consciously sometimes and less consciously others. But anyone who reads does the same thing.

 

Reading books in common gives us a common, jumping point for conversation. But the fact that none of us has read exactly the same collection of books also gives us an endless variation of gestalts to contrast and compare, to discuss and share. By having conversations with each other, or better, yet, writing and adding our own books to the global library, books which subliminally integrate the knowledge and experience of previous books we have read, we further enrich the conversation. Knowledge shared in such a way is greater than the sum of its parts. It is also more resilient, because there are millions of minds with overlapping, but different gestalts: different, integrated libraries of knowledge.

 

Individuals need freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and of course, the right to exist without harassment from others for exactly the same reason that books deserve to exist, be preserved, and be shared. And vice versa. Books are extensions of individuals, extensions of our core being that we can share with other individuals in an intimate way that we can’t share anything else, except DNA through the shared parenthood of a child.

 

The fact our species can do this is amazing. It makes both the individual person and an individual book or medium of creation, incredibly precious.

 

Just as shared DNA makes us all part of the same human family, shared knowledge makes us all part of one telepathic family,  brothers and sisters of the mind.

 

You’ve got admit, that’s pretty cool.

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