Books, bringers of light. A fragment of memory of mankind. Voices long gone, reaching us through the complex codes of letters or characters invented by our ancestors, thousands of years ago. The reflections of those long gone, which we have the privilege of sharing.
I read many classics, I spend my time with ghosts. I know their names and often their lives, I know their thoughts, I know them without knowing them, and I shall never know them. They reach me only through Gutenberg's magical invention. Companions of darkest hours, of joyful holidays. Words reverberating in my heart find a surprising resonance within those of people whose lives were so fundamentally different from mine. A reminder of the shared aspects of humanity. Some of them were, by our morals and standards, bizarre or even condemnable. We are surprised, therefore, to see the light which can emanate from them - to see that within one whom we would condemn we find a piece of ourselves.
It is the neverending complexity of mankind expressed within paper and ink, the physical demonstration of human thought. The perpetual vibration of the past, the freedom to express the fundamental pieces, the quest to understand the chief questions to which we may perhaps never find an answer. What is it to be a human? Where did I come from, and where am I going?
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