Dear Reader
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Dear Reader,
Are you a true reader? Can you be true to the writing you love? At the same time, can you be fair and just to what threatens your reality, your theories, your cherished beliefs?
The valiant reader opens a book to tear everything free from its pages.
Some moments can only be met with boundless receptivity. Understand, a passive reading is next to useless, even with this requisite for suspended judgment. In communion with the writer, the author, with authority of the writing itself (notwithstanding sympathy for suspicion against authority in every realm), an active openness clears the ground; now, perhaps, a fateful instant upwells - a new thought, expanded awareness, an insight bountiful for and into the future. One can fail this, something can be missed, and it’s a real loss, possibly forever in the moment. Except such substance awaits in the writing for its searcher. Reading is action, the act of activating a text, and a highest philosophy of reading acknowledges how everything begins - everything - in the secret, silent quickening of mind. Live thinking, live imagining. Paradoxically, the more reverential the delving into a text, the more devilish its interpretation, and the more inevitable an overturning, a sovereign rebel action of activation, Upspiraling. Soon to discover what one really thinks. Revolutionary. Highest philosophy of the reader: seek what is present for what arises timelessly.
Literacy, at the most basic level, seems to be a minimal requirement for moral consciousness beyond mores, as it provides the capacity for engaging in discourse outside of milieu - the opportunity for awareness to rise above evil or corrupt norms, influences.
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (a novel which unfolds with astonishing precision and fidelity to the one indispensable telling amidst a multitude of other possible, inessential, versions) implies as much; Hanna, the Auschwitz guard, never begins her reckoning with conscience until she at last learns to read in prison, after her sentencing.1
It’s on you, Dear Reader, to think. To stop, in case meaning is present. Or promised. Or possible. After encounter, ignorance is no excuse; nor is ignoring the demands of angelic harbingers an acceptable use of sentience. Knowledge drops from order and chaos alike. If writing is to be meaningful, reading must be meaningful. In the face of the deep, to cast light is the one and only significant act. To do less is to be less, an illiterate in reading the world’s turbulent script. Existence makes itself meaningful, as it is, out loud or in silence. The soul, despite its freedom, fails itself when it fails to engage an honest reading of the essential.
Reader’s sovereignty demands a certain honor.
In mind, in play, the words “sentencing,” “sentence,” and “sentience”… see more on the concept of basic syntactical competence as a requisite for discernment in an earlier post from Poetry, Thought, Word Magick, “Big Words (& Long Sentences)”:
