If on a winter's night ....

I chose Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler thinking it would fit into my theme of winter or Christmas stories, little did I know it wouldn't be any such thing but something even more. Calvino died in 1984 when I was just graduating high school and going off to college. I would not have chosen this book to read at that time in my life. Do you think books find us when we are ready to read them? Something like the old adage that the teacher will come along when the student is ready.

I read the first page while standing among the stacks at the library and thought it sounded fun. The whole first chapter deals with you the reader. The conditions for reading must be just right before you can proceed. Are you the right temperature, if not get a blanket or open the window. Is the light level right, the noise levels (tell the family to pipe down), do you have something to drink at hand, are you sitting in the right chair? Finally when all is right with you and your world you can begin.

Now this book doesn't belong to me, it belongs to the library so I can not highlight it, or write in the margins. This is where I must praise the inventors of the post-it-note, they have expanded their product line to include these tiny pop up strips that come out of a highlighter which I can't use on this book, but I can stick a harmless tag on a page where I have found something I want to jot down later. This book is starting to have a collection of these little tags sticking out all over it.

This morning I came across this quote written by a character who is an author suffering from writer's block, "writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process," (p. 169). This thought piggy backed on a previous post about books being the oxygen to a reader. Here it is the act of writing that provides the breath of the reader. I am going to digress once again into my passion with biology. Only some organisms breathe, and that act is called respiration. Yet all living things must make energy in order to carry out their life functions and this is cellular respiration. To make this energy they must convert the food that they make (photosynthesis or chemosynthesis) or consume (herbivore, omnivore, or carnivore) into energy in the form of ATP. This process can take place in the presence of oxygen (aerobic respiration) or in its absence (anaerobic respiration).

Okay bear with me, biology lesson over. All of this made me think, is writing more like the act of photosynthesis where the inspirational light (for plants it's the sun) is stored in the words of the book (like a sugar molecule) which when read (cellular respiration) releases its energy once again within the mind of the reader? The law of conservation of matter/energy states that matter/energy is neither created nor destroyed in a chemical reaction it simply changes its form. So, are reading and writing the two sides of the equation? The creative energy of the writer becomes the energy of the reader. As a reader I know that what I read stimulates me to think in new ways. To apply lessons to my life. To share what I have read with others. As a writer isn't that what I hope to do for others as well. The energy of my thoughts seek to be shared with others. "If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, 'I read, therefore it writes." (p. 176)

Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, translated by William Weaver, Harcourt, Inc. 1981