On the love of books

People who don’t read, lack that mysterious aura about them. You can sense their shallow minds and judgmental eyes. You can hear the ignorance rolling of their tongues.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that those with books in their pockets are perfect or must have saved the world in their past lives. No, never. But it’s the other way around, someone whose room isn’t filled with books, someone who never experienced the utter ecstasy of entering a library can never save the world or change it for the better.

No need to roll your eyes at my words, or to stare at me with that disgruntled countenance. No need to deny it.

People who read are most of the times, the ones looking for an escape, a safe shelter, they are horribly real things in a horrible real world. The ones who have been let down several times by life, the ones looking for something they never seem to find in this real life. They are unable to lay their hands on anything real. They are the ones only able to love concrete things, something you can point to and know what it was.

These people are aware that they are not a name, a height or a weight. They are not adjectives. They are their favorite books, the books that haunt them, the ones they struggle with, the ones they put down and the ones they can’t, the ones they hope to read, and most importantly the ones they love. They are the books they own, both read and unread.

Why can’t people simply read books and be nice to each other? What was so hard about that?

Anytime I think of it, I better be stranded in an island all by myself surrounded by books-a tropical library-,than having to endure the heavy presence of human beings, filled  with everything but humanity.

But I found this latter somewhere else, I found safety and hope in libraries. It loves you without asking for anything in return, unconditionally. A storm shelter, and a flashlight when I’m lost in the dark. It’s my parka in the winter, and my cough syrup. It’s all the lives I lived and all the characters I died with. I have my heart wrapped in the pages of all the books I read, and bleeding hands from all the ones I laid  my hands on. I’m no longer sure which parts of myself are real and which are things I’ve gotten from books. And I must have left some parts  between the pages and lines.

Books never force you to talk, they don’t tell which way you should feel and which way you should not. Books never walk away, and are here whenever loneliness strikes. Their presence is never as heavy as human’s ,whose absence had me immersed in several lives forming bonds with paper characters.

I’m  not saying that books make you happy, they just make you feel satisfied in a way no other being can. Mostly, the books we love are not the ones that enrapture us, but the crippled twisted ones, that make us feel that the walls are caving in and that the storm has no end.

But isn’t that the purpose of literature? To turn blood into ink, and muffled screams into words. Simply, because people don’t write about mirthful things, they write about what haunts them, and their nightmares, about the darkness that engulfs them, and the words they choke on. They don’t write about how the rose was ravishing under the morning sunlight, but how they fingers bled because they touched its thorns.

Never let yourself be fooled by the cheerfulness overflowing from a writer’s pen, sometimes it’s the only form dolefulness can be shaped into. Sad people are not all writers, but certainly all writers are sad and bitter, they are the world trapped in a person, and their mouth is a graveyard where all sort of words died when they tried to escape their lips.