love, read, write

Oh, how long has it been.

I have been fine, thank you. I am back, and I am a tad disappointed in myself, to say the least, but nevertheless, that is what happens every year, and I will deal with that myself and just put post-ly things on here. Blog-worthy writing and prose. No rambling.

(Sorry, no guarantees, though.)

I'd like to start off (it's been too long of a hiatus to say "continue") by asking myself (and you, I guess)--why do we read? Why does literature exist?

It's a pretty broad question many have attempted to tackle with, and I think it is an important question readers should always consider. It's, of course, a very subjective question, due to the fact that everybody reads for a different reason and everybody writes for a different reason. But it's important to assess what values reading or writing has to you, individually, and also for our community as a whole.

Of course, here, I will be putting what reading and writing means to me, but in no way does that mean that reading or writing must have the same values for you, you, and you. Oh, and you, too, all the way over there.

(Don't question my weirdom.)

To me, reading and writing is about empathy. It's about communication and conveying your emotions, your feelings, your--colors, and trying to get other people to feel that feeling. In a sense, anything humans create is art. It portrays the fragility, the vulnerability, the dynamics, the emotion, the spontaneity of the human mind and soul. Words we string together, colors we splatter on paper, songs that we whisper, whatever it may be, it requires a living soul, and thus embodies the art of a living soul inside of it. And so writing and reading is a part of that great general idea of "art."

Reading and writing are also, in my opinion, communication across not just distance or race or people, but across time. It is connecting to your ancestors and descendants, it is reading about who they were, who you are. It is the closest connection we have with our ancestors whom we will never meet nor see.

Reading is empathy. Writing is the medium. It is the closest to empathy that we misunderstanding, selfish humans can get. By reading, we indulge ourselves in another life and world, putting on the mask of the character and wearing the emotions of his actions, feeling the guilt and sorrow and terror the character feels. It gives us the background and insight and details that we will never truly understand in real life. It gives us a connection and a way to empathize for others, to meet people who are fictional yet so real. It gives us the experiences we will never get and we might never have dreamed of. It gives us hope and sorrow, it gives us anger and happiness. Reading can make us cry. But it can also make us laugh.

Reading is a communication of emotion. It's the communication of the essence of the human soul. It holds that brittle, fragile soul that can laugh at jokes and cry at funerals and fall in love and get into fights. It is a soul-to-soul communication that does not walk across the awkward bridge of reality but rather leaps directly from author's emotion to reader's emotion. 

But most of all, writing is a way for me to express myself. It is a way I can say words, stack sentences, pile stories together that I have the lacking of in reality. It is a way to put across my ideas and thoughts in ways I am not fluently able to do with my mouth in person. It is a way to show people what I am like and what I think. It is a way to help me worry less about my inability to speak out and speak clearly in person. Writing speaks. Reading listens. It skips across the difficult bridge of reality and jumps from me to the reader. No stuttering and no hesitating.

Writing is my voice.

What is reading and writing to you? What is your voice?