A Book Has Soul
Notes from beside the Bodies of Work.
A book has a head.
A foot.
A spine.
Joints.
Sometimes, an appendix.
Sometimes, it wears a jacket against the dust.
Its paper is made from trees, cut and folded into leaves. Each leaf has two pages. The gathered leaves are sewn together. The assembled pages form a text block—also called the body of the book.
We break its spine.
Dog-ear its pages.
Gut it. Cut it. Bind it. Dissect it.
The book is bound.
Then we stare at ink pressed onto dead trees and hallucinate.
The words become spells.
We call what happens next reading.
We hear voices no one has spoken.
We enter rooms that were never built.
We love people who have never lived and mourn them when they die.
The world around us disappears. Hours pass somewhere outside the page. We remain perfectly still while being carried somewhere else entirely.
An object becomes a portal.
Perhaps a book was never only an object.
Perhaps it was always a body waiting for a soul.
The writer gives it one.
The reader brings it to life.
We build books from dead things, fill them with ideas, and act surprised when they begin to haunt us.