The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.

Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.

For, surely, people do meet, and they fall in love, but those meetings are random, mere happenstance, and destiny is just the story they tell themselves afterward. But what a sweet story it is! And in the end, to us, that’s what really matters.

That’s what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we’re able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely.

Dreams are like doors. They’re like portals to another reality, and once they’re open, you better watch out.

sometimes it’s hard to tell where a parent’s book ends and a child’s book begins.

Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else? When you eat a wing or an egg or a drumstick, at what point is it no longer a chicken? When you read these words on a page, what happens to them, when they become you?

Why did you revere us so? Because you thought we had the power to save you from meaninglessness, from oblivion and even from death, and for a while, we books believed we could save you, too.

This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurling it at his feet. The Angel wants to stay, to awaken the dead, to make whole what has been smashed.

There was a song about a teapot she used to sing to Benny. How did it go? Maybe the words would come back to her if she bought it.

People don’t come naturally to me, and I’ve had to study and practice, like when you’re first learning to read and have to sound out the syllables. I have to learn people phonetically and then memorize them by rote.

Children have a limited ability to understand a parent’s inner life, perceiving it through the lens of their own subjectivity and understanding only as much as impacts them.

People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced. If even one person were left out, the world would be diminished. And he said you don’t have to worry about being creative. The world is creative, endlessly so, and its generative nature is part of who you are. The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it.

She placed the globe down in front of her workstation with the others. It didn’t fit in. All the other globes were cheerful and kitschy and mass-produced, and this one, so bleak and beautifully handcrafted, made all her other little worlds look cheap and foolish.

Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.” He sighed. “In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.”

I told the B-man all this, and he said poetry was like that, too, like breezes or winds in the mind. At first you might not feel much, not whole words or sentences, but more like currents of air moving across an open wound. You have to keep your mind open and try to feel the voice of the poem as it blows by, even if it hurts a little.

He liked knowing more than his father. What boy doesn’t?

When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken.

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it’s every person’s task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

Why was it that women could never work hard enough to quiet their nagging fear that they were not enough? That they were falling behind? That they could and should be better? No wonder they wanted simple rules to govern the way T-shirts should be folded, children raised, careers managed, lives lived. They needed to believe there was a right way and a wrong way—there had to be! Because if there was a right way, then perhaps they could find it, and if they found it and learned the rules, then all the pieces of their lives would fall into place and they would be happy. Such delusion.

Those books she’s read are the co-parents of the book she writes, and she will act as midwife to its birth.

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.

If your left hand gets a painful splinter, what does your right hand do? Does your right hand say, “Oh, that’s too bad, but it’s not my problem”? No, of course not. The right hand pulls the splinter out. This is interconnectedness.

“This is real,” he said. “This is happening, and we need to help each other. We cannot do it alone.”

Books are eternally hopeful. That is our nature.

Blame is just another way of refusing to take responsibility for your life, and when you blame us, you give up your own power and agency.

“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.”

“ ‘Ze truth about stories is that is all we are.’ A famous Cherokee writer named Thomas King once said this. We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too.”

I wondered if the Aleph was in his poem, or if I was. That would be weird, to be in someone else’s poem, or someone else’s book.

This is the terminus of your mother’s dreams and all her good intentions, and you are standing on top of it.

His words awaken my world.