Books

"The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for"
Allan Bloom

I cannot imagine my life without them. I was 5 when I first discovered the miracle of reading. I was at my grandma's in the country and my best friend was 8. She was learning to read and to write and I was her shadow. I would not eat or do anything without her. A few years passed and she started to guide my readings. She and her brothers had this great bookcase in their big house. My grandma's bookcase was rather modest as it had been little by little deprived of its books by my uncles and by the time I turned 8 I was already an avid reader. My friend began to sneak books away from her house and from the inquisitive looks of her older brothers and bring them to me. We would read the same books and then talk about them and we would even act them out. I remember we had read "Shogun" by James Clavell once and the book had such an impact on us that we started acting as if we were Japanese. During the following weeks, we built a sort of house in which we would kneel when entering, we would drink sake and bow to each other while mumbling polite phrases from the book. Those were wonderful times. A few years passed and still under the influence of that book I even took courses of Japanese language and culture for a couple of years.

When I was in primary school I remember my mother tried to snatch books away from me. She said I was reading too much and that I would soon become blind if I did not stop. I did not stop and I am not blind. I do not even wear eyeglasses. I guess she must have been taken by surprise. She did not know how she was supposed to handle a quiet child who always had her nose into one book or another. She must have thought that something was wrong with me because I would not go outside and play with the other kids. But I had already discovered that there was a whole world out there waiting for me and that the more I read the more I needed to understand.

I have since read a lot. I seem to be always surrounded by books, I love them, I love the way they smell, I love to finger them and feel the softness or roughness of their pages and they have become my best friends. I always carry one in my bag, just in case I have to wait for somebody or something and I would otherwise get so bored I could not stand it. They accompany me wherever I go. I would certainly take a book (or several) on a desert island. After all these years, I must admit that I would also need to be connected to the Internet. I am absolutely and helplessly addicted to this new huge source of information.

I sometimes sit and think of all the books I have read and I realize that I hardly remember the names of the characters or the plot as a whole. But I never doubt for a second that each and every one of them has left me with something very important. My brain was shaped by the countless little facts and mental images I extracted from my readings. I owe who I have become to them.