In Praise of Magic

It’s easy to think of magic as some esoteric, dark arts, abracadabra, good witch/bad witch, form-changing, wand-waving, spell casting, selective power type of thing. Good or bad. Dark side, light side. An art for the few, for the lucky, or for the unlucky.

Often, I’ve thought of magic as something I wished I had in my everyday life; a spell to slow something down or speed it up, a talisman to protect myself and others, a rune to guard a location, a bag, a person, a secret, or a way to transport myself from one place to another.

Other times, I’ve thought of magic as the beautiful little moments that catch me by surprise; laughter with a friend, time in the mountains, the glimpse of a wild creature, the joy of remembering what it is to be alive. 

But magic, real magic is always just a blink away – and it’s overlooked because it seems normal, mundane even.  

Magic is being able to read and reading is a form of magic. I mean, strange symbols thrown together that have meaning and can be written, read, and spoken? The ability to take in those symbols and be transported from wherever I am to Antarctica, Mars, someone else’s home, someone else’s head, or another fantasy world with creatures I’ve never seen in real life.

In The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, Joyce Carol Oates speaking from the writer’s perspective says, “The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.” And what would a novel be without the ability to read it? I know I’ve taken the ability to read for granted (even while remembering what it was like to learn to read – hanging upside down on the couch while my longsuffering mother said over and over again, “Okay, now what’s this word?”) sometimes even grousing over what I’ve had to read, forgetting what a thing it is to be able to do it.

Frederick Douglass, writer, social reformer, abolitionist, and statesman said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” He also said, “I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

Magic is being able to read and another kind of magic is being able to then act. 

While reading a delightful series by Martha Wells called The Murderbot Diaries, I found myself in a new world, with strange, wonderful, and sometimes terrifying characters, thinking of issues very similar to the ones that Douglass faced in his real life though here with the buffer of science fiction and humor; issues like slavery, will, human rights, freedom, fairness and equality. And as I stayed up too late and squirreled away daytime minutes to spend time with this character, I marveled at the force that the words had to pull me into caring, into joy (and sorrow), and to show me a made-up world so clearly it seemed real.

What a special skill, what an arcane gift it is to be able to read. Powerful enough that if I chanced across Murderbot in real life I’d recognize it and know that while I might want to give it a hug, it doesn’t like to be hugged or touched, and that’s okay.

There is an endless supply of stories and that’s a whole other strain of magical art. The magic used to read means I can go in one moment from Murderbot’s data feed straight to Virginia Woolf’s diaries over to Frederick Douglass’s work to the inside of a Zeppelin without having to move a muscle (well, with minimal muscle movement if we’re counting the muscles in the eyes).

What a power. 

Reading is a form of magic and I’m glad I’m a practitioner.