Dust.

I am once again having a coffee at Chapters.
A different one than last evening, but a Chapters nonetheless.
And the evidence of Potterdom is everywhere. There are pallets of books, I have counted at least three of them.... you know, those big boxes that are sometimes used to display watermelons in the supermarket? Full of Harry Potter. On skids.
It is hard to truly fathom the amount of books that were sold, and that continue to be sold today, and into the future. In the paper there are stories of post-midnight lineups, 300 and 400 people deep, at local bookstores. Waiting in line. Eager to buy a book. I love it.

Strolling though here today, on my way to the Starbucks, I casually picked up a novel called Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. He is an award-winning Bombay-born Canadian writer. If I recall correctly, one of his books, A Fine Balance, was an Oprah Book-Club selection.
As I was waiting for my coffee, I was reading the back dustjacket of Family Matters....
“His books will be read long beyond his lifetime.”
-- Montreal Gazette –

That really struck me.
Can you imagine?
I mean, can you imagine being the author, and seeing this written about your work, and displayed right there on the back of your work?
His books will be read long beyond his lifetime.
Mistry seeing this, would read it: My books will be read long beyond my lifetime.
That, to me, is truly an incredible thought, but obviously (given that the horrors of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, or Orwell’s 1984 don’t come to pass).... it is true.
His work will outlive him.
On shelves, in libraries, in bookstores, he will live.
Ninety years from now, a young man can go into his grandparent’s basement and glance at an old lopsided bookshelf down there in some spidery recess of the room and find this very book (the one I am holding in my hands perhaps) and flip it open, and read it.
The words that speak to me now (for instance) can as loudly speak to him, then.
This is the magic, and the power, of the written word.
As long as there is the combination of availability and comprehension, the book is eternal.
This is why what the writer writes, is even more important than what the writer says, or even says about what he/she writes.
The writer will die.
The writing, will not.
Writing, vis a vis, the written word is like the actor that survives his own performance, even though partway through he is called upon to die. And to die convincingly.
The writer may change as a result of mixed reviews, but the writing will not. Here too, it is permanent, once set down.

I imagine the following conversation which is not at all real, yet I hear it:

I think that there is a connection between writing and the fear of impermanence. It [writing] is borne of a need to perpetuate THOUGHT. If I do not write it, it will die. More correctly, it will not LIVE.
Does it not live if I keep it within, here where the thought itself is gestating, and developing?
Yes, but it will not live in any separate sense. The thought dies with the thinker, and the thinker will most certainly die. But set the thought down, and it more than lives. It runs. Set it free. Set it loose.
On its own?
Yes, on its own. If left in its embyonic stage [the thought of the thinker] it will die as surely as a fetus would, were its yet pregnant mother to perish. The cord must be cut, and only when ready, and only by writing. To write is to detach the best of yourself from yourself.
This seems to suggest that our grandest thoughts are MEANT to be transmitted to others. Not witheld, in other words.
Agreed. In my opinion, it is sad to contemplate the books that went to a coffin, unwritten.
And what of our basest thoughts? Are they meant to be transmitted also?
Perhaps, yes. One thing is certain though. It is the grander thoughts that are the most difficult to transmit in writing. We are not as prone to desire transmission of our baser thoughts, as we are our grander. And that is why it is so difficult to write. We want to be worthy of ourselves. The “masters” are those who have broken through this specific barrier in human communication, using the written word as their vehicle. Trusting....

This imaginary conversation was broken up as I went to get another coffee.....

Now I am back.
And I hear you say to me...
“Ahh Cipriano, your little pseudo-dialogue as recorded above.... do you not see it for its elementariness? Really, all that your imaginary friends are suggesting in their little tete a tete is that if we do not write something, it will not be written.”

“Ahh yes dear reader of such things, it is very elementary, I agree. But do any of us really realize how serious it is? Do I myself? I must not, for I have never been read by others, and have never published anything to be purchased on a single obscure shelf, much less by the watermelon skidload after midnight in stores. But, were I to die today, oh, the stories, oh the poems that would turn to dust.....”

Someone who was one of the “masters” said it like this:

When a man in a melancholy mood is left tete a tete with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he will live and die in obscurity, and he reflectively snatches up a pencil and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy.
-- Anton Chekhov, in his short story “Lights” --