It has been said that a person who reads, lives a thousand lives and a person that doesn't, lives but one. Anyone who reads; and while reading, places themselves into the story would agree with that statement. I have always been a reader, preferring history or historic fiction, although I will read anything that's interesting and keeps my attention. Through my reading I have learned of ancient lands and peoples once as high and mighty as we see ourselves. Most have been lost to time, war, and sometimes stupidity. It is those links with the past that give me the passion to travel, and to visit the hollowed ground where our ancestors once lived, loved, and died.
I have lived many lives in my conscious mind while reading. I have experienced joy, passion, excitement, heart ache, pain, and even death. Reading is an escape from ones own reality, but it can also be as real and as tangible as our everyday lives: It all depends on the reader and their depth of emotion while reading; how into the story they let themselves go. Imagine yourself on a medieval battlefield surrounded by the enemy. You are part of a shield wall surrounded by your friends and family, standing shoulder to shoulder defending each other. The reader has a choice, to either read on to the next sentence, or they can smell the breath of the enemy in front of them, choke on the smoke from a nearby fire, feel the weight of weapons and armor, and experience the fatigue left as their adrenaline starts to fade. That is what being a part of the story means; living the written word.
For one person to write a story, and another, completely unknown to the writer, to read it and feel its emotional meaning is what separates us from other beasts, we have a conscious mind that has endless potential, to dream, and to create. These are gifts from God, or Gods, depending on what you believe; but sadly, some would use these same gifts to suppress our feeling and emotions through politics and religion; burning the very books that give us the freedom to explore our minds. With the rise of Christianity much of the vast wealth of knowledge that came from the classical world was lost to fire or hidden and never found.
The Greeks believed that true wisdom was found inside our own minds, and philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, and the arts, flowed for theirs. The Romans, although ruthless, connected the world in a way that only has been matched after the industrial revolution, their knowledge and that from millennia before them was largely lost after the fall of Rome. The dark ages followed and people became slaves; slaves of one book; the church and land owners keeping what knowledge that was left to themselves. Average people had to struggle to free themselves and re-learn all of the things that the ancients had known so many years before. It would take another thousand years to reach the age of enlightenment, and another thousand to get us to where we are now.
With the electronic age we have all of the knowledge of the entire planet at our finger tips, we can expand our minds and dream things that no one that came before us could. Don't keep your head in the sand and ignore the gifts that we have, don't live one life, through one book.. Let your mind wander and dream, and when you dream reach out and grasp it and live a life worthy of a book that others would read and live.
