“Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?”Rabindranath Tagore · Păsări răzlețe · 1916 · Fragmentul 325
A book is a meeting with a reader the author will never know.
Tagore turns reading into a meeting across time: the writer dies, but his words reach someone he will never know. The mechanism is the direct question: the reader a hundred years later is made to reflect on what connects them to a vanished stranger. A concrete example is the feeling of any reader opening an old book and sensing that someone wrote it precisely for them.
Why it matters It speaks to anyone who has felt an old book answering their personal questions, a century away from its author.