The Why of a book - Metaphysical musings of an impassioned bibliophile
We never understand books. Sure we read them and embrace them; we devote shelves, rooms, buildings and even empires to them yet their fundamental nature remains elusive. The why of the book is a mystery! Nothing of the book is permanent except for the book itself and it stands firm, like a house whose rooms have known many occupants.
It is easy to define what a book does. As easy as it is to define what a person does; accountant, lawyer, doctor, mechanic, vagrant but the what is not the why. If one were to ask what is the book? The answer presents itself ready made. But ask why is the book? and you have taken your first steps into the unfamiliar and uneasy ground of the metaphysical. We don’t like to ask why as adults. Why is a child’s question. Adults are trained by the weighty passing of years to not ask why. It is far better to accept and to move on with happy, befuddled complacency. Readers; real, honest readers are like children with a quizzical why always dangling from slightly parsed lips. Real readers talk the words written on the page and in so doing engage in conversation with the book itself. It is a habit learned in youth when words had to be sounded out and when we were read to by our parents. The written word is always introduced through speech and a part of it remains verbal, even when we realize they are only markings on a page.
Perhaps that is the why of a book. Why? Because books have something they wish to talk about and we want desperately to listen to them, even when we think the voice is our own.