The Great Transmission

They are collections of thoughts, parcels of wisdom — written, curated, and sometimes transmitted across ages.

The great book is this

The mind of a single human turns, and his perceptions coalesce. He transcribes his inner voices and creates what amounts to a script.

A book is a voice; packaged, measured, controlled. And, if written well, it harmonizes with our own voice, so that before long we find ourselves singing along, a quiet karaoke to the one familiar song called this life, this time.

Sometimes the voice is so uncannily familiar, so particularly resonant with our personal zeitgeist, that we find ourselves sucked into a jarring mirror-world of synchronicity and deja-vous. We feel seen, known, understood, but not uncomfortably so. For the writer in such instances has earned our greatest trust. His faceless voice has artfully and subtly entered our inner sanctum like a tendril of smoke.

Language, the written word, is the greatest of all our magic. One mind travels through time and space and co-mingles with another. We merge with Shakespeare. We pace the sleepless midnight corridors with Plato. Seneca says, ‘I am too great to be my body’s slave.’ Because we extend beyond it. That is our greatness, the limitless extension of mind.

The greatest minds defy the death of the body through the immortality of words, conveyed by books. Hail to the writers, but thank God for the men and women who are wise enough to preserve them.

To write well is to think deeply and read often. Great writing is rhythm. It is an art of the ear. But great writing is music only insomuch as the reader is musician. We play the symphony in our head to a grand audience of one.

Perhaps there are no great books, only great readers, of which the writer himself must be, or his music will fall, flat and false[VC1] .

This is great secret of Seneca and Buddy Glass.