As
I was looking at some of our bookshelves from across the room yesterday, they
seemed like shelves of treasures – rows and rows of riches past measuring. Each
book seemed like a separate precious item, like a little chest that chose us to
find its fortune. These are books we’ve had for years, but only yesterday did
they appear to throw off, all of them, the lavish kind of light great books can
give. I realized, maybe for the first time, that each of these books contains countless
numbers of ideas and feelings – that I could search, for instance, a single Shakespeare
play for days and even years and not know the border lines of its wisdom. The
way each of these books works is the way a limitless gold mine might work: you
walk in and start searching and don’t stop because it doesn’t end. I might live
for twenty more years, but it would take ten times twenty years to take in all
the treasures of these books – these small, simple-looking packages of paper
and print on the shelves beside our fireplace.
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