Love of Books

“In each word, all words. — Yet, speaking, like writing, engages us in a separating movement, an oscillating and vacillating departure.”  Maurice Blanchot

My grandson is 8 and he is a reader. My wife believes that if a child can read, they can do, almost anything. I agree. I have always been a reader since I could remember and when I was his age, I loved books just as much as I hope he does. In the 1950s there was no World Wide Web, no Instagram, no instant communications, nor was there Facebook. We did not have a TV, so we could only learn about the world from our parents, the radio, our friends or from printed books.

We were poor by today’s standards when I was his age and buying a book was not an option, but belonging to the library was an option. So, most of what I read came from our library. Every two weeks we would go to the library and while my mom picked out her books, I would browse the shelves reading covers and opening up books to sneak a quick read of a few pages. I wanted to spend hours grazing on the feast that was there for us, but time was always too short. I would pick out about 5 or 6 books that would capture my attention for the next two weeks.

Books are special, there is something magical about a book — the texture of it in your fingers and the way it looks on the stand by your bed or snuggled in with others in the bookshelf.

During the day, after school I had chores, so the only time I could read was when I went to bed. That's when a new world would open up to me in the books I loved to read. When my mom would come in and say lights out I would read under the bedclothes with a flashlight. I was always a bit nervous that I would be caught and the book hauled away, but I never was caught. 

I read stories of exotic places and I imagined I was there.  I read about Tarzan of the Apes, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Fin and found the genre of Science Fiction and Mystery which I still read today. And the more I read, the more I wanted to read.

Reading set my imagination on fire, I remember watching the story of Tom Sawyer on TV when I was about 16 and I thought, he doesn't look like the person I saw when I read the book. 

Why do we read?  We read to remember. We read to forget. We read to make ourselves and remake ourselves and save ourselves. “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life,” Mary Oliver wrote in looking back on how books saved her. 

I read and it helped define me as I grew up; many of us read to understand who we are and why we are here. We read to become selves. The gift of reading is that books can become both the oxygen to keep you from suffocating and the very wind that sculpts the canyons of your life, turning it in this direction or that, crossing great distances and opening new territories of being, cutting through even the toughest foundation. 

Hermann Hesse wrote in his visionary 1930 meditation on “the magic of the book” and why we will always remain under its generous spell, no matter how the technologies of reading may change.

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