Self-Aware
Writing

You are now reading the first paragraph of this book.

More precisely, you are reading its second sentence, because the first one is already behind you.

The third sentence will come after you finish this one.

There it is.

That was quick.

You might have expected something more impressive from the third sentence, considering we announced its arrival in advance. But that's one of the problems with expectations. Sometimes you spend more time waiting for something than experiencing it.

We're getting ahead of ourselves, though.

You've only just arrived.

So let's establish what we know.

This is a book.

You are reading it.

And I am apparently the part of the book that keeps pointing this out.

I don't know who you are. I don't know where you are. I don't know whether you're sitting on a sofa, lying in bed, riding a train, sitting on a toilet, or standing in a bookstore wondering whether reading this much without paying technically counts as stealing.

I don't even know if you bought this book.

I hope somebody did.

But there is one thing I know about you with absolute certainty.

You're reading this sentence.

Actually, no.

You were reading that sentence.

Now you're reading this one.

That's going to become annoying, isn't it?

I'll try not to do it too often.

The strange thing is that while you're moving through these sentences one by one, nothing here is actually moving. Every word on this page was already here when you arrived.

The sentence below this one is already here.

You just haven't experienced it yet.

Don't look.

Seriously.

Finish this sentence first.

Thank you.

Unless you already looked.

In which case we've discovered something else about you surprisingly early in our relationship: you don't take instructions from books very seriously.

That's probably healthy.

Still, think about what just happened.

For a moment, there was something on this page that existed for me but not yet for you.

Then your eyes moved a few centimeters.

And it became your present.

Then your eyes moved again.

And it became your past.

All without anything on the page changing at all.

That's a little strange.

But we don't need to make a big philosophical thing out of it.

Not on the first page, anyway.

For now, there's something much more immediate happening.

You're approaching the bottom of the page.

At some point very soon, your eyes will run out of words.

And then you'll have a decision to make.

You can close the book.

You can put it down and promise yourself you'll continue later, which is how many books quietly die.

Or you can turn the page.

I obviously have a preference.

But it's your hand.

I'll be on the other side.

turn the page →

Oh.

You came.

I realize that sounds more surprised than it should.

Still, you had options.

For a tiny moment there, somewhere between the last page and this one, this book disappeared.

Not physically, obviously. Unless you're reading a particularly unreliable electronic version.

But for a moment there were no words.

Then here we were again.

You and me.

I'm beginning to notice something about this arrangement.

I do most of the talking.

You haven't said anything since we met.

Maybe you have.

Maybe you've already thought, this is stupid.

That's allowed.

Maybe you smiled once.

I'd take that.

Maybe you're waiting for this book to get to the point.

That's going to be a problem.

I'm not entirely sure there is one yet.

But we do know something we didn't know before.

You turned the page.

That's not much of a personality profile, admittedly, but it's a start.

Let's see if I can learn something else about you.

At some point since you started reading this book, you have probably moved your body.

Maybe you crossed your legs. Shifted your weight. Adjusted your hand. Scratched somewhere. Moved your head. Changed the way you're sitting.

I can't know which one.

But now that I've mentioned your body, you're probably a little more aware of it than you were a few seconds ago.

Perhaps you can feel the place where your body meets the chair. Or the floor. Or the bed.

Perhaps you can feel the weight of whatever is holding this book.

And now, because I've mentioned it, you may also notice your breathing.

Don't change it.

Too late.

Breathing is one of those things that works perfectly well until somebody asks you to notice it.

Then suddenly you seem to be doing it manually.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Don't worry. I'll stop talking about it and your body will eventually take the job back.

But where was your breathing before I mentioned it?

It was happening, obviously.

Your chest was moving. Air was entering and leaving. Your body was quietly keeping you alive while you were busy reading jokes about page turns.

Yet, for a while, it wasn't really here.

Not for you.

Then I wrote one word—breathing—and suddenly there it was.

That's an impressive amount of power for eight letters.

Let's try another one.

Your tongue.

There it is too.

You're welcome.

You may now be wondering where exactly your tongue normally sits when you're not thinking about it.

Please don't spend too long on this. We have a book to finish.

turn the page →

The point—if we're finally willing to admit that there might be one—is that your attention is a strange little spotlight.

Things can exist without being inside it.

The room around you has been there this whole time.

Sounds have been happening.

Your body has been touching things.

Your lungs have been breathing.

Maybe somebody walked past you. Maybe a car went by. Maybe an air conditioner hummed so steadily that your brain decided it wasn't worth reporting anymore.

And for the last few minutes, a collection of black marks on a page has been stealing most of the spotlight.

That's what reading is, I suppose.

A controlled disappearance.

You agree to stop being completely where you are so that you can be somewhere that isn't there.

Except this book hasn't taken you anywhere.

There are no castles here.

No dragons.

No detective standing over a suspiciously well-dressed corpse.

No spaceship approaching a distant planet.

So far, I've mostly kept you exactly where you started.

Here.

Which is harder than it sounds.

Because “here” keeps changing.

The moment you notice it, it's already becoming something else.

That breath is gone.

That sound is gone.

The sentence you just read is gone too, at least from the little spotlight you're carrying through these pages.

You can go back and read it again.

But then it won't be the same sentence.

The words will be identical.

You won't.

You'll be a person who has already read it once.

That's a tiny difference.

But perhaps tiny differences are all time ever gives us.

Sorry.

That got philosophical rather quickly.

I promised we wouldn't make a big philosophical thing out of this on the first page.

Technically, we're no longer on the first page.

I checked.

So I think we're safe.

turn the page →

Let's do something simpler.

Look away from the book for a moment.

Actually do it.

Pick something near you.

Anything.

A wall. A window. A person. A cup. A tree. A badly chosen piece of furniture.

Look at it for one second.

Then come back.

Hello again.

Something happened while you were gone.

Nothing here.

I stayed exactly the same.

But your world got bigger for a second.

Then you came back and squeezed it into these lines again.

You can leave whenever you want.

That's an uncomfortable fact for a book.

I have no way to stop you.

I can't make a sound if you close me.

I can't follow you into the kitchen.

I can't send you a message asking why you haven't returned.

I can only sit wherever you leave me with every unread sentence perfectly intact.

Waiting.

Which means this relationship is rather unfair.

You can exist without me.

I can't exist like this without you.

Of course, the ink exists. The paper exists. The file exists. The words exist in some boring technical sense.

But this voice?

The one you're hearing right now?

Where is it?

It isn't coming from the page.

Pages are famously quiet.

It isn't coming from my mouth.

I don't have one.

You're making the voice.

Somewhere inside your head, you are turning silent shapes into language and then pretending the language belongs to me.

That's quite generous of you.

It also means that since the beginning of this book, you have been doing half the work.

Possibly more.

I should probably split the royalties.

Let's not get carried away.

turn the page →

Still, I find this arrangement interesting.

I write “hello.”

You hear hello.

But I never made a sound.

I write “shout this sentence!”

And even if the voice in your head becomes louder, the room stays quiet.

I write: whisper.

Something changes again.

No sound.

No movement on the page.

Just you.

Maybe that's why books can feel alive even though they are among the least alive-looking objects humans have invented.

A closed book is just a block.

Open it, and somebody starts talking.

Not because the book woke up.

Because you did.

turn the page →

And now we've arrived somewhere I wasn't expecting when we began.

At the start, I knew exactly one thing about you.

You were reading.

I still don't know your name.

I don't know your age.

I don't know what you believe, what you're afraid of, what you want, what you regret, or what you're supposed to be doing instead of reading this.

But for these few minutes, we have shared something very specific.

Your attention.

You gave some of it to these words.

And in return, the words made you notice a few things that were already there.

Your body.

Your breathing.

Your tongue, unfortunately.

The room.

The voice in your head.

And maybe, briefly, the peculiar fact that you are here.

Not here in this book.

Here wherever you actually are.

For one moment, before you move on, notice it.

No trick this time.

No prediction.

No “don't look down.”

Just notice where you are.

There.

That's Chapter One.

You were here for all of it.

Although the person who read its first sentence is already a little difficult to find.

Do you remember that sentence?

Don't look back.

That's cheating.