Every Atom | No. 136

Introduction to Every Atom by project curator Brian Clements

 

This passage reminds me of one of the earliest transforming moments I experienced with Walt Whitman.

 

 

Of all the transforming moments I’ve experienced with Walt Whitman, this, being an early one, stands out.

 

I was in college, reading Leaves of Grass. I came upon this passage.

 

It was, in fact, night. I was, in fact, alone in my dorm room. After I’d read that passage, I had to put the book down for a while.

 

All great books, of course, are exchanges between a living reader and a writer who is no longer living, but once was. A great book is able to unite two people across the time/space continuum.

 

I knew that, in theory at least. But no writer had ever addressed me so directly. No writer had ever reached out like that, from the other side of mortality itself. I understood, viscerally, for the first time, that Whitman had not only been as alive as I, but that he could imagine me, in what he considered the future, as vividly as I could imagine him, in what I considered the past.

 

It permanently altered my sense of the power of literature to literally transcend death. I’ve read with that thought in mind ever since. But Whitman was the first to say it straight to my face.  

 

Thank you, Walt Whitman, for that and for so very much else.