what they do: for the deep unuttered occasions of their lives. The
reading I have in mind is an act of the imagination that is equal to,
for all its difference from, the imaginative act of writing. The
power of reading lies in our capacity to enter into the world of the
book and become a mover in it, to make that world our own. I t’s
the active capacity to live, for a time, in some other life than our
own daily one, and in that way add to our experience, to make
new discoveries in the world of the senses, to see new
connections between things, to make leaps of moral awareness
that give us a more complete hold on our world (in Tulip,
1990:279).David Malouf elaborates by defining readers as a particular body of women
and men for whom the act of reading, the experience they have in books, is as
essential as daily bread and that the real reader belonged to no particular type or
stratum of society, or profession or level of education. What he or she possessed,
in the same mysterious way that other special abilities appear, is “ ... the capacity to
enter passionately, and with all the senses, into the physical act of approaching
words and touching a world” (in Tulip, 1990:278).
(b) Reader 1. J.C. (Retired senior secondary school teacher of English
literature.)
This respondent frequently alluded to the first verse in the Gospel According
to Saint John, ‘I n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God’. She began I am interested in the notion of the “Word” becoming
“Flesh” and “dwelling amongst us”. As she said later in response to Question 12,
The writer is a translator of experience, thus, writing and reading is, to me, a
mystical and creative experience. I t is a quest and therefore highly religious, to
evoke, distil and shape experience, knowledge and wisdom succinctly and as
perfectly as possible. I t is making the “Word” flesh. Writing is both a personal and
collective function which shapes the energy of ideas and fashions those ideas into
readable words on the page. Very satisfying, like God creating the world, through
the Word.
Q1. She responded by saying that ... words have a kind of spiritual significance
and writers undergo a process of creation which is kind of mystical. The reader
undergoes a process of re-creation when reading so it is all a very mystical and
creative process which the writer shares with the reader. We [ the writer-poet and
the reader] are the two arms of God and the book is God’s mouthpiece.