{"id":1376,"date":"2017-03-02T21:13:07","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T21:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1376"},"modified":"2017-03-02T21:50:44","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T21:50:44","slug":"the-miraculous-world-book-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1376","title":{"rendered":"The Miraculous Ongoing World Book Project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/glass-poem.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-1375\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/glass-poem.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"461\" height=\"346\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/glass-poem.jpg 1632w, https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/glass-poem-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/glass-poem-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/glass-poem-1024x768.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 461px) 100vw, 461px\" \/><\/a>World Book Day, March 2, has such a universal title. \u00a0It is an opportunity to celebrate the book, but also to marvel at the devotion, the worship that a lot of people have for it. \u00a0This reverence goes beyond the simple object. \u00a0Books have rescued\u00a0people in tough straits from the aloneness of their childhoods, their prison sentences or repressive regimes. Books become saviors.<\/p>\n<p>It is not a far leap to think of authors who hold the book sacred, and attempt to write a sacred, all-encompassing Book that is a literary microcosm of the universe.\u00a0 James Joyce\u00a0had that grand view; \u00a0in <em>Ulysses<\/em> and <em>Finnegan\u2019s Wake<\/em>, for instance, he swept everything &#8211; including the Search for All &#8211; into his books\u2019 structured core.\u00a0 He took his model from Homer, Dante, Milton, and before that, The Book that started it all &#8211; the Hebrew Bible.\u00a0 In the great mystical act of creation, the book exists concurrently, even before Genesis; no book, no world.<\/p>\n<p>Convinced at bottom that there is only one book, authors and poets like Mallarm\u00e9 and Blake attempt to stand in Creation&#8217;s ongoing stream, and through artistic revelation, channel it. \u00a0If one stays open to nature, as Baudelaire suggests in the poem &#8220;Correspondences,&#8221; one can connect with its underlying structures, the universe\u2019s core. \u00a0It is an act of profound attention: Letters, freed from literal mundane function, mysterious incarnations of sound, are full of primordial meaning. \u00a0 Writing poetry might be catching the breeze of energy as a page is turned.<\/p>\n<p>The book is everywhere: World as text, World at book.\u00a0 You have to be open to reading it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>World Book Day, March 2, has such a universal title. \u00a0It is an opportunity to celebrate the book, but also to marvel at the devotion, the worship that a lot of people have for it. \u00a0This reverence goes beyond the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1376\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[538,542,539,178,541,540,543],"class_list":["post-1376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-world-book-day","tag-alchemie-du-verbe","tag-books","tag-james-joyce","tag-mallarme","tag-mysticism","tag-ulysses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-mc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1376"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1379,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions\/1379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}