There are two kinds of readers. One is traveler looking for scenes on the scenic terrain provided; attention and pace deployed toward the reader's enjoyment. The other Reader is hunter-gatherer, stopping to forage upon ideas and feast on reflections.
The first Reader values how many travels are made. The second never really finishes the journey the book has provided. The ideas and reflections attain to a meal of absorbtion and digestion, to a togetherness of Author with Reader, of idea and vision with reality,
The true Author and Reader are a recoming together; have some sharings of porch; stand at, and walk along some fences together; refire the forgotton torch; make some campings together; travel the roads less traveled by, re-blaze the trails now freeway-passed by; answer the soul's needings why.
Sentence or paragraph of literature utter, between the lines: "ponder this and partake for truest need." They weave assimilations of knowledge, beauty and enlightenment for the Reader's life. The great book's passages clear a truer trail, blaze a more bountiful passage through Earth's time, being and place.
Oh, how the treasure left behind contests the treasure ahead! With such sweet sorrow, each paragraph is departed from; each page reluctantly turned. Trail-strewn passages still chant their deeper and wider nourishments hidden in herb-like leaves and brick-like stones. Nurturings and nutrients too numerous to backpack along the trails of human mind, through the storms and climate changes of language, into the Earth-dwellings of human being.
These deep Readers read writing that has fruited into Literature, beyond the mere stems and flowers of prose or poetry. These readers may, at last, reach the end of the trail of pages. But literature--of any length-- is never finished with readers; nor readers with literature. A great book provides no ending at its end. And no ending of their reading. True literature runs deep; its depths run deeper than any reader; deeper than the author that created it.
A great book is greater than the Author. Authentic human idea and vision outlive the mortal Author; they are remembered more widely than a human's name, escaping the confines of their creater. Their roots run wide and deep across Earth's conscious and subconscious fields of being. They do not stop with the Author's absence or death. Just one Reader, adding some water to one idea, to one shoot of compassion, pushes the root a little farther, adding to humanity's deeper grasping into life, it's rooting into all living being, its retappings into Earth's Human Soul.
A great book grows into the life and soul of the Reader as a linguistic organ or ontological gland. Understanding, imagination and vision are enhanced by the seeds of wisdom thus implanted. The book, its rootings and sproutings, are with the Reader till the end of his days.
The great book leaves a kind of "literary prayer" or "reverence" within the Reader. It leaves something like this: "Yea, though I walk through this valley of the fallen; I fear evil less. For, my books are with me."
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