On finding our way with words

Is there a book that you feel changed by? A writer whose words shaped the course of your life? For me, it was Milan Kundera. I adored him as a teenager, devoured all of his books, eagerly awaited every single new one, and I still have massive respect and admiration for his way with words and how they impacted me.

I even went, with a fellow word-nerd book-loving friend, on a trip to Prague inspired by multiple readings of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book I wrote my university dissertation on (Philosophy & English Lit, thank you Manchester Uni). Tracing my journey with and through this book, I remember now that it was a former relatively significant other who introduced me to it.

That's the magic, the power, and the wonder of words, several of which were exchanged in deep and meaningful letters with aforesaid others. I was moved and changed by that phase of my early teenage and bookish life.

Truly, I was in love with the beauty that I found rendered in words, how they gave meaning to experience, to feelings I grew a language for and deeper understanding of. Kundera taught me what it meant and how to capture the sense of relationships and people who were altered by the troubling matters of the mind and politics of time and place. He swept me into all sorts of conscientious awareness and consciousness. It's fair to say he's one of my original paper guides, my heart teachers, mentors from afar. He lit something up in my heart and spirit, made fireworks spark in my mind.

“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding." - Milan Kundera

This quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is an interesting one, it's the provocation of a contrarian - what do you make of it?