People and Words

          People are a great deal like words, words great deal like people.

          Words take birth, live diverse, unexampled lives, and die. Words also sometimes reawaken from their own ashes, like a phoenix. And so do people. Words and people both are fond of weaving new sagas. Both want to be rich, be popular, and be therefore successful. Similar words and similar people flock together to form language and civilizations, respectively. Words and people - there are too many of both of them.

          Words, like people, have a status, a reputation, a level of respect. Some words, otherwise illogical, find themselves being mentioned under the list of the most used, and some beautiful words, from time to time, are content in remaining latent.

          Words string with each other, like the beads of a rosary, and form a story. People collegiate with each other, like characters in a plot, and form a story. Stories made by people and stories made by words, both show resounding similarities. Some stories grow up to be famous, become fairy, folk or classic tales, and some stories get dead and buried.

          Words and stories have their creator. People also do. The author always knows what lies on the last chapter, but the words on the pages of the first chapter do not. The maker, in people’s case, knows the end, while the people are unaware of it.

          A writer knows, and so does a musician, a singer, a painter, that although words and strokes are necessary, and gorgeous, yet silence, wordlessness, tranquility, have a charm of their own. An excellent prose may be able to describe a butterfly landing on a soft dewy flower under the slanting light of the sun, kissing it and shooting away, yet at one level, every word will fail. And silence will fill itself into the void perfectly.

          Perhaps that is the reason why the publisher leaves some pages blank before the beginning and after the end of the book, and so the thoughtful creator.