A Book is Like a Sacred Isle
A Rain of Booklight... A Book about Books
(There is a link to the manuscript of this book, below...)
The Quest Alight
What is a Book? ...Or, what is it like?
This sounds
like a crazy question, doesn’t it? Of course we know what a book is! At least
we believe we do. But I have come to see this as having many different answers;
and perhaps not ones we would ever suspect. One day I found myself pondering
this nonsensical question.
I happened to
see an open book, lying upside down on the grass beneath a huge spreading tree.
A forgotten book; accidentally left behind, I presumed. I looked about me but there
was no one around; there were no people to be seen anywhere. It had been a
sunny day; but now it was grey, and cold, and lightly raining.
As I stood
there time seemed to cease. I remember this strange sensation; it had happened
to me before. It was as though I was there for hours, and yet I am sure it was
only for a moment or two. I was standing there under this tree just staring at the
upturned book. It was laying on the outer edge of a little protective ‘harbour’
in between two great buttress roots coming out from the base of the trunk.
There was still no one around, but I felt shy at the thought of picking it up. I
walked on. I tried to forget about it.
But later that
evening I couldn’t get the thought of the open book out of my mind. For awhile
I kept chiding myself for not picking it up and taking it. I could see the book
so clearly in my mind; the attractive colours of its cover picture – yellow,
gold and white, and purple. I was reaching out to it. All at once it was like I
was seeing a translucent mist rising up from it. I saw this mist was its energy.
Light was shining within it, sparkling, speckled with gold and silver and many
soft colours; it was beautiful! Suddenly I knew, with a flash of insight, that this
was its ‘spirit;’ and that all books had ‘a spirit.’ Immediately this thought
came into my mind: ‘What is a book?’ Strangely,
not for one moment did I think it a foolish thought. On the contrary, it seemed
to me to be infused with wonder! It filled me with excitement!
How astonishing
the potency of one tiny instantaneous thought; a question coming to one, from out
of nowhere; from ‘out of the blue:’ it set me upon a path of introspective
questioning, leading to the writing of a sequence of poems, and a piecemeal
series of articles and stories; which fully occupied me for a few months! This
book you now have in your possession came directly from just that one tiny
spark of light and life!
A link to the manuscript... a pdf word document
*
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