If on a winter's morning the traveler arrives....

Note the sticky tabs of learning

Okay I realize that it is not yet winter, the solstice is not until Friday, but it feels and looks like winter outside today. I sat cuddled under a blanket with my morning cup of coffee and finished Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler just a few minutes ago. It has been one of those intensely rich readings, nourishing and challenging to the brain. He closed the book with a discussion amongst some readers at a library as to the meaning of reading. Each declared their own personal philosophy of why they read and yet as a reader each one made perfect sense to me. We read for all different reasons, yet all our reading is interconnected. It is a matter of our brain chemistry. As discussed, the new reading that we do is connected to what we have previously read. Just like the synapses in our brain are connected, so too are the memories of the things we have read. Haven't you experienced that yourself? As you read you are reminded of something, what was it? Was it in a book? Or a movie or TV show (remember they all started as a written word hatched in the brain of a writer)? Maybe even an event in your life since writers take and fashion the world into their creations. It has been a book that has made me think. I have had to think about my own reading while I've been reading.

The beauty of marking a book while reading is to go back and see what you marked. Don't you know that when I looked at the very first sticky tab, there was the start of the final discussion that the book ended with. Fancy that! A circle was started and completed. Would I have had that insight, had I not been tempted to mark that early passage because it struck me as such a profound thought? I could have finished the book with the memory of the ending most prominent as it was the last stimulus in my mind. Again brain chemistry is to blame. Pathways must be built and strengthened for strong permanent memories to take hold.

One other thing that attracted me about this piece of work was his allusions to matter and the chemistry of the world. Twice he relates the "matter" of a book: words, sentences, grammatical structure to the elemental particles of matter: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Or at least that's what I interpreted from those passages. Writing and reading are real and have substance just like that which makes up the universe. Underlying these two things, writing and reading, is the energy of the universe waiting to be explored and released, a universal truth that runs through us all since each of us is made up of the same matter. We are all just star dust which was generated when the universe expanded with a big bang, and there was light.