'I've felt that way too'

The hands that reach through time to hold ours

Sometimes I’ll be reading a book, and it occurs to me that someone wrote those words one day, before they were printed and bound. Perhaps it’s a writer who still types new projects now, or maybe it’s one who has been buried for centuries. Either way, those words are like a suspended moment held within the paper, and it exists at all the points in time it is read.

Written words shared at Kensal Green Cemetery, London

When I pick up Frankenstein, I’m reading the very same words that Mary Shelley wrote after that stormy night at Villa Diodati, when a ghost-story writing competition proposed by Lord Byron led her to dream up one of the most influential novels of all time. They’re the same words I first read in my Year 9 English class when our brilliant teacher introduced us to gothic literature, and I ran headlong into the genre’s twisted branches without planning to return. Spoiler: I didn’t return. I reread it last Spring, seven years on, for university. Those different instances are connected; the same narrative event occurs at each of those points in time - just as my reading it somehow connects me to the millions of others who have experienced the story too.

I remember hearing this Alan Bennett quote while watching a college production of The History Boys:

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

- Alan Bennett, The History Boys

The moment I heard it, I felt seen. ‘Yes! I know that feeling! I didn’t know others felt it too!’ And of course, the quote itself was doing exactly what it’s talking about: Bennett’s hand reaching out to me from the play. It’s doing the same to you right now.

At a bookshop in Kansas, America - across the world from bookshops I usually go to

Perhaps you’ve experienced this too, and it might feel as though my hand is reaching out of this page to take yours at this moment. It is. I think that’s one of the main reasons we humans create; it’s to form the portals for a million, billion connections to be made, so that there is always a hand waiting for someone who might need it.

Isn't it fun to learn new things; to expand the roots of common knowledge, knowing that it connects you to someone else, alive or dead, who has learned the same? It could be memorising the constellations, identifying a species of butterfly, or practising how to sketch a face. Countless others - with hearts beating in their chests, paper-skin, locks of hair - have read the same words, experienced the same realisations, and carried out the same actions. Though unseen, there's a mirroring across the globe and through time. It's like joining a club, the membership unspoken... and thinking about it makes me smile.

What have you read recently that made you think “I’ve felt that too”?