Thursday Thoughts...

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

Margaret Atwood

For those experiencing winter the sense of frozen voices and frozen music is closer to home than for those of us sweltering, but the images Margaret Atwood conjures up and the beautiful way she expresses them reach me wherever I am.

The sense that a musical score and black alphabet marks are inert until we interact with them make me think about the power of engagement; the power we have to bring things into being, simply by our playing or our reading or our speaking. I am sure there are whole arms of philosophy and/or science that seek to explore the idea of whether something exists without our interacting with it - at what point does something come into being of its own and so on.  I don't need to ponder the depths and details of that; I just want to sit with her ideas of readers being musicians; and how each reading or playing produces a different interpretation.

There is something marvellous in the written word and in the written music that leaves room for interpretation, and our own personal experience to be brought to bear and change the way the music or the book is understood. For that moment.