The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

(Pro captu lectoris) habent sua fata libelli. (According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies. —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake.

People were doing that, making memory quilts from the clothing of departed loved ones. It was a beautiful idea, really, to wrap yourself up in memories and give old clothes a new life.

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.

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.

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?

‘The world is a beautiful book for those who read it.

For you, books were just a phase, a brief expression of your instrumentalism, a passing fad. Our bodies were convenient tools you used until the next new-fangled device came along. In the end, we were just another one of your Made things, no better or worse than a hammer.

The first words of a book are of utmost importance. The moment of encounter, when a reader turns to that first page and reads those opening words, it’s like locking eyes or touching someone’s hand for the first time,

it occurred to her that, really, a mother never stops carrying her child,

The sound of pages turning is so nice, and so is that soft shushshushshushing sound that things make when they know they’re being taken care of. You’ve been to the Library. You know what I mean.

And what about the troublesome matter of more? For most humans throughout history, “more” wasn’t even an option. “Enough” was the goal and was, by definition, enough.

The Public Library is a shrine of dreams, and people fall in love here all the time. Maybe you don’t believe this, but it’s true. Books are works of love, after all.

“Never be afraid of not knowing, young man. Not knowing is ze practice of poets and sages.”

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. Children are remarkably obtuse that way,

Slavoj says the artist’s job is to disrupt the status quo and change the way people normally see things. He says we have to shatter the optical subconscious and make things strange. Wake up from this ideological opium dream we call life.”

Also, just because I’m not good at making art doesn’t mean that I’m not creative.

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. We books are evidence that this is so.

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.”

Ze emptiness of a page can be unnerving. Too much unformed potential.

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 said the trick is not to grab at the wind because as soon as you do, it won’t be there.

Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

The Bindery was primordial, a place of vast, boundless silence that contained all sound, and emptiness that contained all form.

“Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.”