Carving cities in your flesh, skins tickling your mind;
Their lives but leaves of apparition in an erudite rain.
They are monochrome people, who live in a flat world of white paper and black ink. We all know them, each of us in a different way.
But their weight is either heavily light, or lightly heavy.
And they are, for me, one of the best parts of Literature.
The first is, of course, the extraordinary beauty of the syncopation of words, of the power of the tiniest sentence to evoke the most striking images. And then is this - this whole plethora of people that come out of these spaces and times within the lines, and soak into your life as if their presence has always been there, albeit invisibly.
They haunt you, they soothe you, they comfort you and inspire you, they lead you towards and unexpected catharsis. What makes them extremely relatable is, on one side, the expertness of the writer with his art, and on the other, more importantly, the subconscious awareness that they are not entirely fictional. They would have stemmed from some experience of the writer, some experience of another living being just like us who has metamorphosed them into paper people. It is this sublime comfort that even our deepest experiences, sorrows and joys have all been experienced by others, in different levels and intensities that lingers with us. They are an ambiguous hint that all human experience is shared experience, just not shared at the same time and same place together.
And that, to me , is one of the greatest achievements of art - to bind humanity in an invisible thread of awareness of each other and of themselves, and bring in a sense of solidarity on the subconscious level.
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