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.  

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