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Space For Rant editorial it goes back at least as far as Herodotus who was reading five centuries before Pliny the Elder, who was reading in the first century A . D . . Dante read to an audience: Charles Dickens attracted a crowd who responded emotionally, and today readings proliferate. Readers find credible the author's voice, writers long to reach an audience, "to know," as Robert Motherwell has said about his painting."that they got it exactly." Toward the end of Alberto Manguel's book is a photograph identified as the library of Holland House in West London damaged by a fire bomb in 1940. It's an astonishing image and I thought at first that it was a contemporary photograph o f the bombed library in Sarajevo. The roof has fallen in, a mound of ceiling beams and charred rubble fill the room but the walls are intact and lined with almost undamaged books. Three men. behatted and dressed like bankers on their way to work are browsing, reading book titles, each lost in thought, seemingly unmindful of incongruence, danger or place. They are absorbed, have been transported and in the chaos and insanity of war. have turned to books. Think of the phrase "learning by heart." It's Petrarch's but he has it spoken by Saint Augustine, in an imagined conversation. What Saint Augustine recommends is committing to memory and thereby making always available to yourself, something read which touches the soul, something of significance. From the page to the mind, via the heart, to the soul. Words can have just such transit, This editorial by Meeka Walsh first appeared in the 1996 fall issue (Volume 15 Number 4) of B o r d e r Crossings, an international arts magazine published in Winnipeg. Meeka Walsh is the editor of B o r d e r Crossings and a writer and critic whose book of short fiction, T h e G a r d e n of Earthly Intimacies was published last fall by Porcupine's Quill. writing of Saint Teresa. He chose these words in 1988, in his last-written prose works. What he wanted those graduating students to know, what he believed and wanted everyone to know is that "Words lead to deeds.... They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness." I had the great privilege this fall to have had a book of short fiction published. With significant and established literary presses like Coach House closing down, the opportunities to read the work of new writers or new kinds of writing is diminishing, so I count myself privileged. I was doubly fortunate in that I was invited to launch my book at the Eden M i l l s Writers Festival and there, thrice blessed to be reading on stage with Leon Rooke, who makes magic and crackle with his pen and voice, and with American poet Carolyn Forche who has. with her words, stopped the heart of anyone with conscience and maybe with these same words stopped, even briefly, the wicked hand of political dictators the world over. Margaret Atwood was reading at Eden Mills and Rohinton Mistry and the poet Gerry Shikatani. Yann Mattel and Leon Rooke's teacher and writer from North Carolina. John Ehle. and James Reany and Ann Marie Macdonald. Matt Cohen and Anne Michaels. In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel quotes Franz Kafka on necessary books. Not books that make us happy, says Kafka--those we can write ourselves--"What we need," he says, "are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces is such a book, a lyric axe to our frozen sea and that. 1 believe, is what she intended. The International Festival of Authors opened its series this fall with an evening of film and audio clips, writers talking, reading from their work or responding to questions. But these weren't contemporary writers. What a remarkable thing to hear, or almost hear, on an aged and deteriorating audio tape. Robert Brow ning reading in 1888 and Alfred L o r d Tennyson reciting "The Charge of the Light Brigade." To see six seconds of Jack London, the only existing film, and to be able to get. from that quick flicker, a sense of his intense and brief vitality; to see Borges move unseeing through his library and pause before a particular book, take it from the shelf, handle it and replace it and move toward another; to see W i l l i a m Faulkner, small and nervous, and hear him speak powerfully to a graduating class about the necessity for vigilance in the face of political "What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide."--Kafka tyranny: to see George Bernard Shaw, before the world was media-smart, playing with the medium of film. These voices and images on film, faded and smudgy, jumping and sometimes disappearing entirely were a link to augment the existing works in print and their tenuous, tremulous, almost ephemeral quality only heightened the conviction that no matter what, writing does prevail. There's a long history of authors reading their work. Manguel tells us