Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

A poem or story consciously written to address a problem or bring about a specific result, no matter how powerful or beneficent, has abdicated its first duty and privilege, its responsibility to itself. Its primary job is simply to find the words that give it its right, true shape. That shape is its beauty and its truth.

Reading is a means of listening. Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.

Oh money what wonders you perform (and how rarely are you so well spent).

But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your

Whether a fantasy is set in the real world or an invented one, its substance is psychic stuff, human constants, imageries we recognise. It seems to be a fact that everybody, everywhere, even if they haven’t met one before, recognises a dragon.

The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

Most people now understand “genre” to be an inferior form of fiction, defined by a label, while realistic fictions are simply called novels or literature. So we have an accepted hierarchy of fictional types, with “literary fiction,” not defined, but consisting almost exclusively of realism, at the top. All other kinds of fiction, the “genres,” are

I do not use the word myth lightly, to mean fantasizing or falsification, but in its proper sense: myth as a necessary story, concerning realities important to a people, and leading to moral perception and interpretation.