A well-worn philosophical thought experiment asks, “If a
tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a
sound?” Plain logic tells us such an event certainly creates sound waves.
However, if there is no ear drum, human or otherwise, upon which those waves
can pound, does the tree-falling event really happen?
Yet, while a tree falling in the forest may be said to
happen without an observer, I would argue a book without a reader is suffering
an existential crisis of the first order. Though a tree does not exist, nor
does it fall, for the sake of an observer (observing a tree is certainly
a privilege), a book is incomplete until it has found at least one reader. Readers
are to books what the ear is to music, the ass is to rhythm, and the eye to the
DaVinci. Books are only a glory when their magic is allowed to flicker in the
hearts and minds of readers. A book without a reader is an idea, as ephemeral
as a ghost, or worse, a paper-weight.
Granted a reader, a book awakens and its story becomes flesh
and bone, it is allowed to breathe! When a reader lets the first few words of a
story into his heart, a character is aroused from her imposed slumber and she takes
a quick breath and is glad, exultant to be alive. Her heart beats and the blood
flows in her veins as the words unfold. A smile crosses her face and her eyes
light up. She knows the curse of sleep has been broken. She rises and walks
across the land. The reader whispers the prose to himself and a breeze winds
through the trees as the sun warms the spreading earth.
And when the book is laid aside once more the character
returns to sleep reluctantly, desperate in her netherworld until a reader picks
up the thread of her story and lets her sun rise again.
The reader is the final, indispensable god in the creation
of the story.
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