Our wealth of Books:
The drifted Relics of all time!²
Books, rather than mouldering behind an iron grating,
Far from inquisitive gazes, should be worn
Under the eyes of a great many readers.³
Books must be read as Deliberately
And Reservedly as they are written.⁴
The books we read are Kindling!⁵
We get no good by calculating profits from a book:
So much help with so much reading—it is rather
When we gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of Truth—
‘Tis then we get Right Good from books.⁶
There is no frigate like a Book
To take us lands away—
Nor any Courser like a page
Of Prancing Poetry!⁷
A marvelous book reveals countless Secrets,
Alleviates pain & fear, dissolves doubts.⁸
We place around us our Books to form ourselves a Home.⁹
A book isn’t made of sentences laid end to end—
But of sentences built into Arcades or Domes!¹⁰
¹ Mahmoud Darwish tr. Denys Johnson-Davies, Psalm 2
² George Eliot, Middlemarch
³ Jules Verne tr. Robert Baldick, Journey to the Center of the Earth
⁴ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
⁵ Eliot Schain, Disciple
⁶ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
⁷ Emily Dickinson, There is No Frigate
⁸ Primo Levi tr. Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann, Unfinished Business
⁹ Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
¹⁰ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own