The Unique Power of Reading, Part 2
Last time I talked about the power of reading to communicate with the dead. Well, better put, to have the dead communicate with us. Though the author may have shed the chains of mortality many decades ago, their thoughts, ideas, and stories are still with us, and we can read them and hear their voice speak to us from the page.
Let’s push that idea a little further. If you read this blog regularly, you know about Doctor Who. Even if it’s from seeing (but not necessarily reading) the Who Reviews. Doctor Who is a TV show about an alien who travels in time and space in a police box called a TARDIS. The remarkable thing about this TARDIS, aside from being able to travel in time and space, is the fact that it is bigger on the inside than on the outside. On the outside, it looks like a blue box, barely big enough for two people standing. Inside, there is a cavernous control room, and a seemingly-infinite number of rooms and corridors and cubby holes. There’s a whole world, a whole dimension of existence, within those walls, that can swallow you up and keep you exploring for days.
Not only can a book take you back in time so you can hear Dickens tell you about Victorian London through the eyes of Oliver Twist, or have Agatha Christie transport you to Twenties England with Hercule Poirot, but within it’s covers is a vast world to explore. In fantasy novels, the world will be mapped and detailed, such as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Lewis’s Narnia, or Rowling’s wizarding world. In these tales, and others like them, you get a sense of vastness, of places unexplored, expanses that are as limitless as your imagination. Other novels will take you to real places, maybe places you’ve never been, captured in a moment of time. Whether it’s the smells, culture, and drama of Haiti in Edwidge Danticat’s BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, or Kabul at the turn of the twenty-first century in Khaled Hosseini’s A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS.
Wherever it might be, imagined or real, within the space of a few hundred pages between two covers, you have your very own TARDIS to travel the universe and traverse the space-time continuum, to visit strange, and not-so-strange new worlds, without leaving the comfort of your favorite chair.
Reading gives you the power to be a Time Lord!
And when things in this world seem to get out of control, and become hard to deal with, that can be a wonderful thing.
