Reading Charm

My Favorite Earring

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. . . .

"Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries."

by Visionary American Scientist, Carl Sagan (1934 - 96)
from his book Cosmos
in Chapter 11: "The Persistence of Memory," pp 295, 297

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See also
Neil Gaiman & George Saunders

And of course,
Emily Dickinson:

There is no frigate
like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers
like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may
the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

Emily Dickinson
American Poet
1830 - 1886