The page is terrifying and liberating. I want to layer it on top of my ideas, to place the world around it and beneath it. I want it to lock down my thoughts so I can keep them on my shelves and look back on them like memories.

Writing freezes a moment and reinforces our memory. Soon the words are shaping our collections of recollections.

I like to sit inside books when I open their hinges, and to feel protected by their fixed boundaries. As soon as those boundaries are taken away, dissolved, reshaped to include everyone at once and nobody in charge, how do I stay on the path? Why do I feel like I need a path? I experience the world through my own experience, and I only hear one voice at a time in my head, writing my narrative for me, as I do. If we open the page to the cacophony, what does it sound like?

You can never cross the same river twice. Can we ever read the same book as another person? Can we ever write the same book as a group?

If we try to organize, to funnel and then filter the best and worst ideas, how much are we going to reinforce cultural assumptions and push away divergent thoughts and experiences?

Words were created to fix information and to lock it down so that it didn’t change whenever we might look at it. If the words keep changing, how long before we start to break them?

Who is the author? Once the text is out there, do they ever stop being the author?

Bay Area author Rebecca Solnit: “Writing is the act of saying to everyone and to no-one what you cannot bring yourself to say to someone.”

Is the future of reading the act of everyone talking to someone, instead of vice versa?

I am here because I don’t know if there are any answers. But I want to find better questions.