A short rave on books.

I must just state that I love books. A lot. I love the elegance of words well formed, the sentences that grab hold and run through your life forever after, the deeper resonances that cannot be put into words but that still fill you with a sense of meaning and an awe of the world around. I love books because it has so often been books that have made me desire to live and live fuller, because books often (or at least the good ones) never claim to be the end all, but merely a pointing finger.

There is also something about the ink, the smell of the pages, the weight of all those words in one's hand.

I have recently been taking more advantage of the Zaventem library's rather impressive English section, have shaken off the guilt of reading in English while I desperately try to cram French into my brain and have accepted again that I need these distant teachers. I realize that this is a rather ridiculous post, but there it is.

I am in intense gratitude for books and language and people like Madeleine L'Engle, Nicole Krauss, C.S. Lewis, Nabokov, Milosz, Wilbur, Marilyn Robinson J.R.R. Tolkien, and many many more.