Plagiarism

Readers! That clandestine phenomenon, that hidden selfishness—readers are merely lazy writers, preferring the easy feast on the fruits of another’s tedious labor to the strain of that solitary scribbling, the dreamy recline to the dolorous hunch, the concentrated potency of what took hours to line up to the nakedness of one’s inability. We read to fictionalize our own originality.

For to read—that is, to read well—is to create. Oh no, no, I banish that postmodern relativism that dethrones the conquering author to praise the impoverished reader. (I prefer the divine mandate of a poetic tyrant to that gross textual democracy.) But to read is to participate in the author’s creation. Anything less is skimming.

We, the readers of great books, are the envious, the malicious. We hate the writers we praise the most. In the act of reading them we reveal how much we want to be them, and yet cannot, else we would be blinking at the desk instead of yawning in the recliner.

(What else, other than colorful pillars of plagiarism, are full bookshelves?)