AspectRain

I read a lot. If I don’t have something to read, I get all twitchy and antsy and generally feel like the world has gone wrong. But, on the other hand, I don’t rely on any particular books very much to give me the facts of life.

Books, those lovely houses of paper and ink, are (to bookworms like me) doorways to entire worlds where we are free to delve in deep, live intensely without embarrassment, and expand our inner, secret selves.

But authors are something else entirely.

People write for different reasons, which many be multiple or dependent on the moon phase or who knows what. Some do it to pay the bills and occasionally surprise [themselves or others] by actually coming up with something worth being expressed. Others do it because it allows them to live in those fictional worlds more completely, exercise their egos as Universe-Gods or just do what makes them feel most at home with themselves. Some people write because they feel they might burst if they didn’t just get it all out onto paper. There might be research and facts and new understandings that beg to be shared, or broad viewpoints and philosophies that need the lashing of public criticism to mature and blossom.

So I don’t really know an author by what he or she writes. I only know that, at that particular point in time (generally the year or so prior to the publication date), they had some will to express this. I wonder where they were when they came up with it, what they tended to be doing while the ideas and plots and bits of information were slowly stewing in their minds developing depth and flavor, what got them through the blocks and blank pages and long hours, and, ultimately, what encouraged them to submit it to a publisher, often several, and then usually despite the onslaught of rejections and closed doors.

Did they birth it and, seeing it in full and binded form, feel their needed release and let it go? Did they linger on it, their one published accomplishment, never or rarely putting forth younger siblings? Was it a rush, a disappointment, or surprisingly anticlimactic? If they received letters from readers, did they jolt at the experience of their first?

Something happens when we see a word in print. It becomes quotable, and quotes are the lazy man’s favorite reference. This is that, you know, because as So-and-So said, blah blah blah. When it’s a celebrity, somehow that suddenly extends to their spoken words as well, bypassing the speech and script writers. I hear the quote from the old female gargoyle, Laverne (voiced by Mary Wickes), from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a lot. You know - “Take it from an old spectator. Life’s not a spectator sport. If watchin’ is all you’re gonna do, then you’re gonna watch your life go by without ya.”

Who wrote that?*

Why the heck are we quoting a cartoon statue?

For that matter, why do we quote Socrates, through Plato?

Why do we quote Einstein or Jefferson or Heinlein?

Because there is power in a written or recorded word. Humanity would not exist if not for the need for the early mother and increasingly immature infant to communicate, to connect with a child more frail than those of our ape cousins, to teach what was beyond instinct. Oral tradition, art, movement and dance, and alphabets. What we lost in blissful, ignorant instinctual motivation, we have gained in the forced development of our ability to comprehend symbols and complex visual and aural cues. It means too much to us.

Finding the quote that says what you were trying to express, but said more eloquently, and backed with a Name, feels solid. Nevermind that being a quotation has nothing to do with being factual.

The same has gone for books all through the centuries. There are The Books, of various religions and cultures and philosophies, and there are a wide array or textbooks and reference books. All of them are the compilation of an author(s) carefully chosen thoughts and interpretations. We refer to encyclo(or wiki)pedias to back up the evidence we proffer, or the analysis of an expert (whatever that means). Occasionally, a good article actually tells you the exact scientific study from whence the inspiration for their version of reality came from. They may even give details into who did it and how it was conducted, and, rather importantly, what that study was actually out to accomplish, which is often completely different than what an author might be using it as evidence for.

Maybe you’ve realized by now that I am a cynical reader who doesn’t take facts for granted. I’ve just had way too many common knowledge “facts” turn out to be total lies or misconceptions. Take Disney and lemmings, for instance. The fact that one of the most common misconceptions happens to be about lemmings, a creature that has come to symbolize mass stupidity, is hilarious.

In all ironic humor, it’s as the Buddha Gautama is said to have said, “Question Everything.”

We should question everything. I think that’s one of my favorite mottos. I’m going to be plagued with children who never stop questioning me, and I’m just gonna have to love it.

* For anyone curious, the names of the team of writers who did Hunchback can be found here.