You just took it out of the box and laid it on the table, and held the question in your mind as you opened it. There was no ritual or ceremony, but it was important to be respectful, both to the question and to the Book, and to have a clear and open mind. Some questions were more significant than others, and with those ones – we always knew if they were big questions – we would prepare ourselves with meditation and fasting. But questions of that kind were rare. You knew the answer at once when you saw it. Sometimes it was on the first page you opened, but sometimes you had to leaf through page after page before you found it. It’s hard to describe how you knew: it was as if the words shone out of the page, although they never actually looked any different from the words around them. And when you found the answer, there was no guarantee that anyone would understand it, at least at first. Most often the answer became clear in time, but sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes, my grandmother used to say, people just ask the wrong question.
What do You think about The River And The Book (2015)?
