The creative act of reading

Ben Okri Week concludes with these thoughts about the relationship between writers and readers:

"This cannot be said often enough: it is readers who make the book," Okri states. "Writers have monumental responsibilities in the execution of their art, but readers also have great responsibilities. They have to make something valuable from their reading. Books are a dialogue between souls. All the untapped energy in great novels should not lie coiled in the pages in vain. The reader should bring the best in themselves to meet the best in the writer's work. There could be a greater potential for good in our lives the more one spirit of freedom dances with another. The energies or the serenity within books is meant, finally, to multiply the energies within the reader, or to deepen their serenity. The true destination of books is life, and the living.

"The first joy, therefore, is the joy of service. Stories enrich the world. Stories can change lives. They have changed mine. All writers, at some point, have to make this choice, ask this question: what is the purpose of my art? Most, I suspect, if they are inclined to respond at all, might say something like this: 'I have chosen to serve my fellow human beings, to soothe, if I can; to create beauty, if I am lucky; to hint at certain fundamental truths, if I am fortunate; and one way or another to give the best of myself to the world, to people I may never meet, and to do so with the incomplete feeling that it is possible only on the page, in stories, that we can be so tender to one another, so true, so free, so humane, so brave, and so pure.'

"It should be clear by now that it is you, great readers of the world, who are the root of the storyteller's complex joy."

The art in this post is by British painter and illustrator Jonathan Wolstenholme, creator of wonderfully witty watercolors depicting the secret lives of vintage books and papers. Born in 1950, Wolstenholme studied at the Croyden School of Art  and is based in London. You'll find the title of each painting in the picture captions. (Run your cursor over the images to see them.)

The passage above comes from Ben Okri's essay "The Joys of Storytelling 1," published in A Way of Being Free.