How you read me

I'm reading a book about how we, as readers and writers, read stories. The writer describes the process of reading in metaphors of painting, moving through landscapes physical and emotional. He recounts Anna Karenina sitting on a train with her book, how she jostles back and forth between the world of her moving train and her book until the book story grows strong enough to pull her into it, away from her own. I, of course, read this on my own jostling, moving train ride.

He writes as a writer who reads, weaving words through classic essays and novels to tell a tale of how we write. He tells of his own journey from naive writer to sentimental and finding equilibrium between the two. Somewhere, this swing of his narrative echoes my own. Reading this is a bit like walking a long trail and finding a little pile of stones that says someone else was here.

And somewhere in this arc it is no longer I who read the book, but the words that find a part of my journey. They name this road and its travelers with their meaning, and in this naming we are read, and we are known. In this knowing I read, and find a self in the words.

 (the book: 'The naive and the sentimental novelist', Orhan Pamuk)