Page 123 - Writes of Passage

MAGIC
Read this to yourself. Read it silently.
Don’t move your lips. Don’t make a sound.
Listen to yourself. Listen without hearing anything. What a wonderfully weird thing, huh?
NOW MAKE THIS PART LOUD! SCREAM IT IN YOUR MIND! DROWN EVERYTHING OUT.
Now, hear a whisper. A tiny whisper.
Now, read this next line with your best crochety-old-man voice: “Hello there, sonny. Does your town have a post office?” Awesome! Who was that? Whose voice was that?
It sure wasn’t yours!
How do you do that? How?!
Must be magic.
Bo Burnham
“Must be magic”, comedian Bo Burnham writes about the act of reading. Indeed it must. Stop for a moment, as Burnham has made us do in this poem, to think about the strangeness of translating marks on a page into voices in your head. And what is more, into pictures. When you (silently) do the crochety-old-man voice, do you see him, or see yourself scrunching yourself up to be like him? Yes, thought so. So do I. Never forget how fantastically weird reading is.
121