Myth of the Reader-Hero
- I, Reader: A Nod to Asimov’s I, Robot
- Robots and Readers: A Tight Coupling of Container and Content
- Does Technology only Extend Thought? Does It also Supplant It?
- Machine Life: The Final Prejudice
- RB-34 Prefers Slushy Novels
- Creative Reading: A Golden String
- Creative Reading by anemone achtnich
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self
- Creative Reading: Thinking with Other Minds
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self, Take 2
- Creative Reading: The Discovery of Other (Thinking with the Minds of Others, Take 2)
- Creative Reading: The Mathematics of Self, Other and Extension
- What Books Changed You?
- I’ve always admired people who, in a pinch, are better than their principles
- Every Extension Breaks a Rule
- The Trajectory of Reading: Creative Contribution
- I Read, Therefore I Write
- What Readers Write May Not Be Literature, But It Might Become So
- “Narrow it down to … the upper left-hand brick”: Phaedrus
- “No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before”: Phaedrus
- Using a Blog to Draft a Book Idea: 9 Observations
- From Reading to Writing to Publishing with Digital Media
- Birth of the Reader-Writer
- To Read a Book is to Ignore 4000 Others
- Quantity has a Quality all its Own
- The Web is Re-Wiring My Brain
- How the Web Works for Readers: Thin Connections Lead to Rich Connections
- The Accidental Programmer
- Definitions of Hacking
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker II: Breaking the Rules
- Ways of the Reader Hacker III: Two Bright Ideas
- A Hacker’s Reading List
- Ones and Zeros, On and Off Switches, All Sane Systems Require Downtime
- The Information Race and Pushing the Button
- How to Make an Elephant Statue
- Every Story Deserves a Good Ending
- Expressions of Offworld
- “Would I start to resemble a book myself?”
- Myth of the Reader-Hero
- Print is Digital
- Am I Still Chasing that First Reading High?
- Do Robots Read? Yes I Do (Conclusion to “I, Reader”)
- I, Reader: A Book Outline
- Reading List for Next Draft of I, Reader
Reading Mysticism, Pt. 1
The adventures of Bilbo Baggins did not end with his famous good-bye to his friends and relatives at his eleventy-first birthday party. Nor did they end in the final chapter of Lord of the Rings. He sailed off with Frodo and Gandalf and the elves into the Grey Havens. Stories demand an ending, but if it has been a good story, are we ever content. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle finally killed off Sherlock Holmes, but at the insistence of his readers, resurrected him. Beyond endings, there is a grey zone, an esoteric or mystical domain, where events defy logic. So too, after the Offworld posts, I have one more theme to offer.
In The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth, James Frey uses Joseph’s Campbell’s insight that myth is the heart of story telling. If there is a mythology in I, Reader, it is like Frey’s description of the hero. Once upon a time, there was a reader living comfortably in his or her world of books, not so different from Bilbo in his hobbit hole. The world changes. Digital technology comes knocking on the door, throws a party. There is an information quake. The reader is compelled to go on a journey, to learn new hacker skills that change the meaning of reading. The reader returns home, but can never really go home. He or she has learned skills that can be used to help others, but change the way everything once looked.
Welcome to the final theme in the I, Reader series, that of Reading Mysticism. It is the least defined and most difficult theme, but it is one I must write. It attempts to fulfill the promise of the Blake poem I quoted early on, the end of the golden thread.
Leave your response!