You go into the library to browse. You pick up six books and head to a table. You thumb through the first four and are mildly interested. Then you open the fifth, and a part of the world that had seemed forbidding suddenly opens to you.
That’s the author-reader connection. Ray Bradbury called it the feeling that you are meeting someone you are destined to meet. It was destiny that led you, the reader, to this author. Bradbury chuckled at the idea, but I bet many readers will recognize it. One author speaks to you in a way nobody else does. Tolstoy was getting at something similar when he wrote that a work of art communicates in a profound way.
I’m interested in Bradbury in part because his interests, tastes and instincts were different from mine. But for all that difference, we were both graduates of the public library.
We’d agree on this: Browsing is one of humanity’s great pastimes. May there always be stacks to browse.
• Source: Ray Bradbury gave his lecture “Telling the Truth” at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, April 2001. A recording is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W-r7ABrMYU
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