Angel Archer on the fusing of book and reality

The book is the reality.
...
To me, too, books are real and alive; the voices of human beings issue forth from them and compel assent, the way God compels our assent to world, as Tim said.
...
So for me in a certain unusual way--for certain unusual reasons--books and reality are fused; they join through one incident, one night of my life: my intellectual life and my practical life came together--nothing is more real than a badly infected tooth--had having done so they never completely came apart again. If I believed in God, I would say that he showed me something that night; he showed me the totality: pain, physical pain, drop by drop, and then, this being his dreadful grace, there came understanding . . . and what did I understand? That it is all real; the abscessed tooth and the root-canal irrigation, and, no less and no more:
"Three circles from its substance now appeared, Of three colors, and each an equal whole."

from chapter nine of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer