The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Thus, one book, when read by different readers, becomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave. Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their own destinies.

In this way, fluid and shape-shifting, we divide and multiply and move through time and space.

We need our mother and father and all our ancestors stretching back into the past. We are a continuation of them and we would not be alive without them.

It was as if the threat of the cleanup had struck terror into the heart of Annabelle’s possessions, unleashing their latent material power, and now they were furiously proliferating, trying to save themselves from extinction.

“In the end, it’s a problem of distribution. You have too much, but others have too little. So we just have to figure out how to redistribute your things and find them homes where they’ll be loved and used. If we can liberate them, we’ll liberate you. It’s a win-win solution, right?”

Picture, for a moment, your own bedside table. Imagine what it feels like to be the top book on your stack, occupying pride of place and enjoying your nightly attention. Sure, the days are long, but we look forward to the moment when you slip between the sheets, prop yourself up on the pillows, and turn on your reading lamp. That small soughing sound you hear as you open the covers and turn the page is a sigh of relief. Then imagine our dismay when another volume come along and tops us, often before you have even read our last page! Imagine the humiliation we feel as, book by book, we slip down to the bottom of your pile, knowing that we have failed to hold your attention and have been replaced, often by lighter, more “relatable” reads. Is it any wonder that some of us who have suffered this fate can get a bit snippy? Sadly, genre-ism is a form of bigotry, and one that is endemic in libraries and bookstores, any place where books gather. This explains why, when several highly regarded critics and social media influencers joined in to lambast Aikon for being anti-book, even going so far as to mock her inability to speak English, there were many among our ranks who applauded.

This caused considerable resentment, particularly among the Unbought on the bookstore shelves, who grumbled about readers being called “fans,” and a readership, an “audience.” And why should the authors get all the attention, when they were nothing more than celebrity midwives with fingers? Bookstores were not venues, but at least when these so-called author events were held there, the Unbought could still hope that when a Tidy Magic reader passed by the fiction shelf, a copy of Great Expectations or Jane Eyre might muster up the fortitude to defy gravity and leap into that reader’s arms. Books are eternally hopeful. That is our nature.

went the happy ones, which Annabelle wanted to save, but in the end she let them go. She watched them streaming out the door like a dammed-up river of time. “You okay?” Cory asked. “Yes,” she said, wiping her forehead with the corner of an old T-shirt. “You can’t hold on to time,” she said. “I see that now.”

“It is ze problem with possessions,” the Bottleman said. “Eventually they possess you. . . .”

“God is a story,” he said. “I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter. If you lose your belief in your story, you vill lose yourself.”

I guess with the Internet, they decided words don’t need to be bound anymore. Personally, I don’t agree. I think words prefer being committed to paper. They need boundaries.