Blank Page

Do you have the same feeling like me looking at the blank page? Its total and absolute purity, the vast emptiness staring back at you like from the depth of the universe. So much can be written on this blank page, so much sense can be made out of emptiness, filling its each vacant block of space with words of wisdom, comedy or perhaps with the pure gibberish.

Writers from the ages immemorial, from the dawn of the civilization looked at the blank page, on papyrus, tree buckle, on curved stone and paper made out of tree, narrated their lives in discreet verses or voluminous texts filled with metaphors and similes, handing down their observations and wisdom to the next generations. Just think about the power of a blank page. It propels a writer to pour out his heart and his feelings on the blank page, creating the thickened plots, rising tension to its culmination point and its gradual receding to a satisfactory ending.

We have our contemporary writers, the best selling ones like Stephen King, John Grisham, Neil Gaiman, Ian Mccewan, Dan Brown, writing stories after stories, describing the battle between the good and the evil in various forms, and the ultimate triumphs of the good over evils in some form or another. We are the lucky ones. We can browse the large book catalogs available online in Amazon, Barnes and Noble and now the new Netflix called Scribd and select any book we like to read. It wasn’t like this before. Think about our grandfather’s time. Acquiring book meant efforts and time, and possibly was costlier more than now. We can now download any book we want in a blink of an eye, reading it on our phone and tablet. We should definitely count our blessings.

Looking at the blank page right in front of me invokes thoughts, especially this very day, the September 11, a terrible day with senseless killings of so many innocent people in America for exactly what reason and purpose still remain very much unfathomable to me. Vengeance has never been the silver bullet of any problem as it proved time after time throughout the history and possibly unfolding in our generation’s time as well. Looking at the blank page it feels the writer in the cave or dwellings made out of straw or bamboo buckles have so much commonality with us the modern ones: our fear, anguish and hope, all meshed up in the same plane of humanity. This blank page is filled up with my these words, banal, you may say, but with thoughts and words at least to reflect on this very special day of human history.