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editorial Space F o r Transit Glory: How Words Move imprisoned Burmese (Myanmar) fiction writer Dr. Ma Thida. The threat, the danger, the solitary act of reading gives rise to individual ideas, the printed word is an inconvenient memory and an irritant to governments and their commitment to "new" programs, and words lead to thoughts and these lead to questions and all of that an impediment to expediency and progress. Alberto Manguel tells us that the earliest written words were meant to be read aloud, that it was believed giving voice to words brought them to life. By the tenth century, solitary. Rant by Meeka Walsh tion or censorship by a listener." Writing and reading--trying and costly endeavours. I read with grief the account of the personal circumstances with which American writer Raymond Carver struggled. Married, with two young children and poorly paying, unrewarding work he despaired of ever finding himself in the position that would allow him to write in the way he wished. In an essay titled "Fires," written in 1982, he imagined he would never be able to write long works. The circumstances of my life, the 'grip and slog' of it, in D.H. Laurence's [sic] phrase, did not permit it. The circumstances of my life with these children dictated something else. They said if I wanted to write anything, and finish it, and if ever I wanted to take satisfaction out of finished work, I was going to have to stick to stories and poems. The short things I could sit down, and have done with. Very early..., I'd understood that I would have a hard time writing a novel, given my anxious inability to focus on anything for a sustained period of time. Looking back on it now, I think I was slowly going nuts with frustration during those ravenous years. Anyway, these circumstances dictated, to the fullest possible extent, the form my writing could take. God forbid, I'm not complaining now, silent reading became the practice and then, as now, the perils of the book became apparent. Along with promoting idleness, Manguel tells us, the Christian fathers perceived another danger. "A book that can be read privately, reflected upon as the eye unravels the sense of the words, is no longer subject to immediate clarification or guidance, condemnajust giving facts from a heavy and still bewildered heart. Each time I read this essay my chest hurts for his struggle and I read it with recognition. But this same writer could quote with conviction and genuine feeling, in an address he gave to a graduation class at the University of Hartford, from the N o w is a lime of fracture, this splintered and open postmodern time that takes us to the close of the 20th century. It's allowed that we question, and history--what we could know with certainty--is viewed with a sidelong, suspecting glance. We recognize there's no single throughline to guide us on the route we are travelling. Grown, we no longer have the comfort or security (ideally the right of all children) of being told while safely tucked in our beds, how it is and always was and therefore will be--now sleep, free from the night fears of unknowing. We're not children and this is a different time. But people who write, the disparate group Margaret Laurence referred to as the tribe of writers, do find a connectedness and it can be there for readers, too. Alberto Manguel's new book, A History of Reading, argues this connected line and ties us with it from the earliest incisions made in small stone tablets dated the fourth millennium B.C. to the present. In all this vast span, there's been almost no perceptible shift in the place writing and reading holds. Writing is record, instruction, communication, transport. Most especially it is an act of immeasurable, unattainable, abiding power. Why else the book burnings through history; why else the vigorous and persistent cry "censor"--our Canada Customs sharing the vigilant watch with the political Right and Christian fundamentalist groups: why else writers imprisoned, tortured, silenced, murdered? Remember the Nigerian poet Ken Saro Wiwa. and this year at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, a petition circulated with PEN Canada, and an empty chair at each reading in an attempt to secure the safety of