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- LETTER: Rebecca Solnit on the solace of books.
- Dear Readers,
- Nearly every book has the same architecture — cover, spine, pages — but you open them onto worlds and gifts
- far beyond what paper and ink are, and on the inside they are every shape and power.
- Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious,
- from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships.
- Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you.
- Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends.
- In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture.
- Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles.
- Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning.
- Some are handheld lights you can shine on almost anything.
- The books of my childhood were bricks, not for throwing but for building.
- I piled the books around me for protection and withdrew inside their battlements,
- building a tower in which I escaped my unhappy circumstances.
- There I lived for many years, in love with books, taking refuge in books,
- learning from books a strange data-rich out-of-date version of what it means to be human.
- Books gave me refuge. Or I built refuge out of them, out of these books that were
- both bricks and magical spells, protective spells I spun around myself.
- They can be doorways and ships and fortresses for anyone who loves them.
- And I grew up to write books, as I’d hoped, so I know that each of them is a gift a writer
- made for strangers, a gift I’ve given a few times and received so many times, every day since I was six.
- Rebecca Solnit
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