“What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.” ~John Green

Believing that an author, much less a famous one, is real in the sense of being similar to you is almost as equally unimaginable as telling a first grader that the sirens from ancient Greek mythology were actually birds, not mermaids. It’s practically inconceivable. But despite lacking physical wings, authors are sirens in the sense that they have both the power to take us on a flight to faraway places and similarly drown those of us wannabe authors who hear their song and dive face first into the rough and unforgiving sea of writing literature. And yet, the song of our favorite authors and their artful manipulation of words draws us closer ever still and in our own way we become part of their written world and the characters that some invisible hand put on paper become our friends. It is this unexplainable hold that words lord over us which causes us to sometimes become so wrapped up in our self-fascination that we forget that someone, somewhere created this consciousness so that we might one day hold it in our hand and feel their inspired intelligence. There is a name on the cover, but it almost doesn’t matter, the book is no longer theirs, it belongs instead to the reader, it belongs to us. And so, we as readers either forget the author, and remember instead only the characters or we remember the writers of our favorite books as something close to a God. This is especially true when the above reader is in fact not a writer, and so sees the process of thought to words to book as being magical in the same sense that a sea-dwelling siren would be. But those of us in the latter mindset must be careful not to become swept away in the romantic notion that authors and writers are created of some substance greater than what we subsist of. In other words, an author is just a person. Maybe a successful and influential person, but a human just the same. And so, the real danger of reading literature comes not only from chucking a book at your sister’s head or misunderstanding the basic plot points, but instead in believing that an author is anything more than yourself. They may have created the world on the pages , but you are the one who gets to live in that world through the medium of reading. It is only when you break the careful boundary between author and reader that you can truly immerse yourself in a text and be comforted in the idea that a person who very well could have been your neighbor, brother,  best friend, or even you understood human nature deeply enough to create art from it. And only once this truth is realized can one fully give in to the ancient siren song of words without fear of danger.