So Many Lives

This is not my bookshelf. I’m sorry to say that, but I do have a lot of the books shown here. This is the bookshelf in the store that I saw as we were rushing by and it made me stop right there in the store and just look at it for a few minutes. It got me thinking.
Every single book we’ve ever read is just a combination of 26 letters. That’s it. 26 letters, and yet it takes up so much of my life. So many of my hours have been spent reading these and so many others, so many tears have been shed for these fictional people. Isn’t it beautiful, though? The author was able to create a whole world from their imagination. They were able to create amazing, lovable characters with depth and layers, and they are able to reveal completely different personalities through slow, beautiful character development. And the readers, they create this entire picture in their minds of what the characters look like, how they move, without ever actually seeing them. You fall in love with them, and you become so emotionally attached to these combinations of letters. And you understand. Books help us to understand people that are different then us. Seeing things through someone else’s perspective, which we can never truly do in real life, helps us to understand why they do things. Sometimes these characters will remind us of real people that we know, and when you learn why the character thinks the way they do, it can help you come to know other people, too. So books are not useless, they are so much more than the 26 letters of which they are composed. Gilbert Highet put it so well when he said, “these are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.”