Told to me by a writer in Utah, whom I met in Dark Canyon, along the upper reaches where the sandstone walls arch up and go through the clouds. She is so famous under her pen name that it makes her laugh out loud. I would venture to say she is on a first-name basis with the spirits who course through this enigmatic canyon, every day, and every night.

THE BOOKS WERE SO BAD, SHE SET OUT TO MAKE THE WORLD FROM SCRATCH

Since books have become commodities, the culture has gotten lackadaisical. That is, it does not recognize that, by what is now thought to be a contemptible, old-fashioned criterion, a good book is a common, clear, useful gift: a lens focusing the light of our attention upon an irresistible, grace-giving reality beyond words, within this world. Neither, in general, do we any longer recognize that there are a thousand and one chances to find our way, that we need the right form at the right time, that the truth has to do a cartwheel, go wrong, get dirty, whisper to a lover, take a rest, sip a whiskey now and then.

Good books were once so conceived. And bad books, they were said—by one or another curmudgeon—to be a cancer of the understanding. They kill our classical hopes, misconceive our most florescent pleasures, cringe and wallow in bitterness and tragedy, and deny with grim pride the possibility of crafted, lucid, complete lives.

But, we thank our stars, these judgments do not have to be made anymore! Books are not given; they are traded: like pork loins.

It has simplified the task of the writer: all she has to do is go to the recipe book.

The critic, however, has a tougher job: he has to gorge himself on professional dishes and risk dying of a fatty soul.

And where is the reader in all of this? Waiting there, in her blessed, life-saving skepticism, in her expectant understanding, in the concinnity of a future she hopes for, because she can see where we might go. Since she is not wholly pleased by the books thrust upon her, she is going to have to write her own.

It’s rumored that she has taken this effort to its logical extension: she is making a language of her own, creating extraordinary words for use in her manuscripts. The other day, a word of hers was found that had flecks of mica in it, so that it glittered in the sun. Another word was seen to have tattoos, as if it had been drinking in bars in big seaports. Yet another, held in the hand, twirled around and did acrobatic stunts.

When will she, with these new words, make sentences? And as to her books, where might we find them, what is she proposing to us?

She is telling stories—they make coyotes howl, provoke geysers out of the ground, lure songbirds out of the sky and into the house, and have, in general, ordinary and easy commerce with the world.

To put it another way, the stories she is telling are not about herself. She no longer looks into the world in hopes of seeing herself. She has set such coarse obsession aside, in favor of the world, the subtle and brazen life within it, the opalescent pattern of events, the slow-dance of night and day.

It is as if soil and wind, light and flower, now have work with her; so, as she writes, can she be the messenger of what she finds, and what she finds is what was always awaiting her.

In other words, as we read, as we live, we are ourselves being read, studied, contemplated. The world which has us in hand, when we take in hand a good book, bears an intelligence which in some historical periods (periods now thought by our culture to be ignorant and irrelevant) has even been given a name: reality. This is one of the reasons why all good readers will thrive, now and forever—they’re in the one company, the one and only company, whose hopes for us, attention to us, and need for us, never fail.

And there’s another, evermore obvious reason: language and light have the same origin. And so the reader, at last, with surprise, with joy, goes with her book to a place she knows, because there she is swept up in a destined, beckoning, open spectrum. There she can, as she has been meant to always, read and study and answer the decisive signals in ordinary daylight.

She will answer, and we will live.