Jojen Reed, Branās preeminent teacher, asks Bran if heās fond of reading, and says the words, āA reader lives a thousand lives before he diesā¦. The man who never reads lives only oneā and āwhen singers die they become part of godhoodā (DwD35 Bran 3: 452). Jojen teaches Bran to open his eyes and learn how to unlock and read the world, even though he may never read it in the same fashion himself. In this moment, George R.R. Martin has opened up the world of Westeros and Essos, their mythologies and people and magic, as a metaphor about reading and storytelling themselves. Perhaps the biggest āpunch lineā in his series is that the squabbles of summer, the games of thrones, the clashes of kings, the storms of swords, are all distractions from the immanent and inļ¬nitely ignored threat of the white walkers, who threaten to storm the wall and destroy the worldāi.e., the threat of total environmental apocalypse, personiļ¬ed in the very spirit of eternal winter. The only reason the audience has such perspective and can get a sense of the necessary priorities is through a kind of warging or greensight, which is the multiple and simultaneous POV character model furnished by the booksā structure. The reader may skin- change into Arya, into Tyrion, into Bran, even into the bodies of wolves, ravens and trees, seeing the land over space and time and across the networks of relationships, cause, effect, farce and foibles, love and hate, heat and cold, dark and light. The act of reading is to see through the eyes of human time across temporal and spatial boundaries, to warg into others and discover the multiplicity of the world through its many layers, and discover alternative ways of being
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