Why bother creating a Web site like Ftrain?

By Paul Ford

A first stab at the answer to that question.

There's only so much to be learned from reading; the armchair football fan grows fat with his bag of chips, watching every Monday-night game, and the reader grows intellectually soft if she does not try to form word-patterns herself. As Scott Rahin puts it, in Sky Frequency:

...in me there still remains the boy's dream that I will tune the radio and it will read out my life story; I still wish I could look at the sky and see constellations spelling "Scott Rahin" and hear black holes collapse with my name on their lips, but I know I this is not what can happen. The bleeding preacher recedes into dreamlife; now, I idolatrously worship dead authors, in a church of books and language. Thomas Hardy, Richard Dawkins, James Joyce, Walt Whitman, Yeats, Blake, Montaigne, Pound, Hofstadter, Henry James, Don Delillo, William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, they invite me into their skins, behind their eyes; I possess them; I cannot tell I am not one of them when I read their words in books, and then they are whispering my name, the dead poets, my stars.

I was lonely in my early 20s, and the site helped me find an audience, invisible, to listen to my explanations of why nothing was working out. Later, Ftrain was a place to break down stories into smaller pieces, and find new ways of fitting them back together. Here, I can work to find a voice. Finding a voice means that you have tuned yourself to speak into the sky; you've found the sky frequency. Someday.