a reader’s reverie

I cannot recall where I first heard it — was it spoken in passing, written in some forgotten book, or merely something I had always known? Oh! What bliss it is to read! To trace letters with eager fingers, to see, not words, but whole worlds unfolding, one after the other, spilling over, limitless.

In early life — how strange that phrase, early life, as if it were separate from this one, as if I had been another child entirely — I remember, or think I remember, leafing through pages before I could truly decipher them, my fingers brushing ink-stamped symbols whose meanings escaped me. And then, at four, the words opened, revealed themselves; I read — twenty stories, or was it more? Numbers blur, but the books remain.

That treehouse in my grandmother’s backyard — forgotten by others, but not by me. It was there, among the dust and the whispering wood, that I found them, those towering books, sixty centimeters long (or so they seemed — perhaps I was simply small). I remember how they loomed over me, how I sat beneath them, my voice ringing out against the hush of leaves, the trees listening as if they, too, wished to hear. Fate, surely it was fate.

If my childhood could be bound and titled, its name would be Books. I have never been able to describe — never adequately, never fully — how it is that words on a page can hold the whole of a soul. That a man, a woman, a mere human with pen in hand, can create worlds. That ink upon paper is not merely ink upon paper. It is thought, it is longing, it is the mind made visible, set down for another to see. And yet, no one — no one — could ever replicate it. The style, yes, perhaps, but not the mind, not the way a thought first bloomed, the precise moment it caught fire.

Books are human, after all. Some are careless, others prejudiced, many contradictory. Some lead nowhere, some unravel into nothing, some find their way home. And always, they change. The first reading is never like the second, nor the third, nor the fourth — what was once new, sharp, luminous, dulls. The moment, that first moment, can never be reclaimed.

And yet, they end. They must. Nothing can last forever. Not stories. Not books. Not even the hands that write them. They die, they die…