For all our modern technology, you still can’t beat a good book, I say. I do here confess it, I’m a bibliophile. Call me old fashioned, quaint or any darn thing you like, but I love those documents.
Weighty tomes they may be, but there’s something about the concerted thoughts of another human being, all that focused energy from that person directly to you and me that’s just awesome, don’t you think?
And I’ve never been a great believer in libraries. They’re a great source of reference material, but I love books too much to just borrow them and have to give them back. I want to own them. That way, they are silent friends, founts of wisdom that just wait patiently for the day you pick them up and work through them. I’ve tiptoed through books, ploughed through books, devoured them, and waded through them, but always I come out enriched. Touched by another human being.
Perhaps most significant to me about owning books is that you can go back to them a second or third time, sometimes years after the first reading, and suddenly the book gives you a whole load of new insights you wouldn’t have seen in a million years the first time around. Or sometimes, it has the opposite effect – the words you once held as a light for your path is now laughably trite.
And you realize it isn’t the book that’s moved on. It’s you. Paper barometers of change.
