As a reader of books for decades, I am incessantly amazed at the power with which the written word opens up myriad shades of life, and so many worlds of experience.
For me, reading is a conversation. I engage in a dialogue provoked silently by the words on a page. According to Virginia Woolf, the reader “differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinion of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of a whole.”
Generally, readers read in two ways. One way is to race through the pages and the other is to read slowly. Reading slowly, rather carefully, is to listen to the sound of words or the meaning they evoke — in the process, you not only read what is written but also begin to perceive. The process of reading however, is common to different fields of activity. For instance, the astronomer reads maps of stars and planets, a dancer reads choreography, a weaver reads design and weave, and a mother reads her child's face. Through books you relive a particular time, a space and all the experiences that you have been through in life; giving it a dreamy quality. That's probably why we have books that we read reverentially, without daring to agree or disagree; others, because we have loved them for so long and so fondly, we can repeat word by word, since we know them, in the truest sense, by heart.
What form can a book take for us? The world of experience comes without a name. But we know that it is books that provide us names for many of our life situations — happy and sad. Writers put in words to what the world is living through silently. It may change the world itself. In Turgenev's “A Hunter's Sketches” there is precious little about hunting — it was only a pretext to bring the master and peasant together. Where else could they have first met, if not in a book?
I once discovered in William Faulkner something I had not known earlier. His narration had such power and the text was so rich and deep with multi-dimensional truths of life: each one of them rang true. In fact, it was because of Faulkner that I learnt to read our own Kannada writers like Masti, Karanth, Chittal, Ananthamurthy, Devanuru in an altogether different light.
In this age of mass media, books are the only source left to us to perceive the life around us and the way we ourselves live. The ads we see, the news we read, our modes of entertainment, the political drama that unfolds before us – everything seems to control our lives and the way we view the world, and also what we value. The phenomenon has given enormous, unprecedented power to media managers, the power to tell us how to live, what to be proud of, how to be successful, and how to be loved.
But books perform the primordial function of mediating history, interpreting brutalising realities, keeping our faith and dignity alive. They also hold reminders to all that we have lost.
