“Twenty-six,” I replied.
“You see, that is a very small number of letters. Can you call what I have outlined a book?”
“No,” I answered. “It’s just an ordinary alphabet, that’s all. Ordinary letters.”
“Yet all the books in the English language are made up of these ordinary letters,” she observed. “Do you not agree? Do you not see how simple it all is?”
“Yes, but in books they’re – they’re arranged differently.”
“Correct, all books consist of a multitude of combinations of these letters. People arrange them on the pages automatically, guided by their feelings. And from this it follows that books originate not from a combination of letters and sounds, but from feelings outlined by people’s imagination. The result is that the readers are aroused by approximately the same feelings as the writers, and such feelings can be recalled for a long time. Can you recollect any images or situations from books you have read?”
“Yes, I can,” I replied, after a moment’s thought.
For some reason I recalled Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and began to tell the story to her. She interrupted me:
“You see, you can still depict the characters from this book and tell me what they felt, even though quite a bit of time has gone by since you read it. But if I were to ask you to tell me in what sequence the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet were set forth in that book, what combinations they were arranged in, could you do that?”
“No. That would be impossible.”
“Indeed, it would be very difficult. So, feelings have been conveyed from one Man to another with the help of all sorts of combinations of letters and forgot them right off, but the feelings and images remained to be remembered for a long time.
“So it turns out that if you link emotional feelings directly to these marks on paper without thinking about any conventions, one’s soul will cause these marks to appear in just the right sequence and combinations so that any reader may subsequently feel the soul of the writer.”
