“Books interested me so much because they were my only friends. I don’t know if I was happy then, but I do know that as I turned those dearly beloved pages I forgot my hunger and misery, and that saved me from resentment and fear. As I learned to read, I forgot my tremendous loneliness.”(Fernando Baez)
I was happily surprised when I got started on a reading assignment for class today. This professor doesn’t usually give thought provoking essays to us, but the intro to this piece “a universal history of the destruction of books” is really powerful. It was really comforting to hear the story of someone else who lived in books, to know that as a bookwormy child I was truly not alone. Often, in adolescence we feel alone, like no one has ever experienced the horrors that we have. Somehow we have suffered most. It is comforting to see, in a scholarly essay, no less, that we are all just nerdy bookworms underneath, that in our loneliness we are never, necessarily alone.
Isn’t that nice?
I suppose . ..
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