Message in a bottle
“I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn’t bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It’s saying, ‘I’m here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.’ ” – Jeanette Winterson
One might say that Scotch is a message in a bottle, hiding away the words of peat and smoke. Certainly wine is a message, extracted with the juice of grapes and the secrets held in the soil where the grapes were grown. Who will open the bottle? Who will taste the magic?
If there were statistics for such things, no doubt we could talk percentages, odds, fate and destiny and say that one way or another, people buy more booze and books. Those who drink too much miss the secrets, while others are lured away by circumstances…a lover sitting across a table…a death in the family…a dynamic football game…memories of failure and joy.
From time to time, we see in the news that somebody threw a message in a bottle into the ocean in Sweden and years later a kid finds that bottle on a beach in New Zealand. A search begins. When the two people find each other, the message that once began in a bottle becomes part of the digital world as the news of the find sweeps across the Internet.
Writers look at the odds of Brita in Sweden writing “Hello, I’m Brita” and Mark in New Zealand finding that “hello” as slim to none. Like Brita, we don’t know who (if anyone) will find our books and how long it will take. But, we hope you, for whom the book was intended, are somewhere and that you enjoy the story and find that like the words of peat and smoke and like the secrets hidden in the soil of vineyards, there are keys and medicines and portals and talismans between the lines.
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Excellent thoughts and well put!
Thank you, Montucky.