Stuffing your eyes with wonder
A walk to the bookstore
There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for treasure.
It was at that age that tales of Coral Islands, Hounds of Baskerville, and Journey to the Center of the Earth arrived. And I raced on chariots with Ben Hur, escaped pirate ships with Robert Louis Stevenson, and floated the Mississippi River with Mark Twain.
I remember walking in the bookstore, looking for superhero comics, and the owner handing me abridged versions of classic tales of adventure. One look at the cover: men floating on a raft, a dinosaur roaring in the background, and all the beautiful illustrations on every other page, and my Sindbad-heart was already in love.
Wonder in literature
I wonder if I realized that early on that books weren’t just scribblings but people waiting, waiting for someone to come along so they could whisper, “We lived.” As I stepped into these shoes with many hues and saw the fascinations and pains of the world through their eyes, I became aware of a common dream: a dream of a human spring.
The human world is made up of words. We understand ourselves, others, and the environment we live in and its history in terms of stories: a god sings a song a thousand years ago, and it becomes a festival; a country is invaded, and their customs and language change forever; your grandparents move from one city to another in search of a job, moving away from the ghosts of the past, and all the possible lives of their descendants change in the process.
These things are commonplace in all cultures and countries, whether we like to believe that our sky daddy is better than other people’s sky daddy. That our pain is more immediate and important. It is no wonder we feel that way: we see and taste the world through our own senses, and lo! The tiny flicker of dust living on a mote of dust considers itself the center of the universe.
So it becomes not only a necessity but a moral duty to move out of our house and visit the little corners of the world that others, with tenderness, have carved for themselves. That is the true wonder that books provide: the beauty of lives lived seemingly so remote from us, separated by chance of time and place, and still their yearnings the color of our own.
And only after we have stuffed our eyes with the life’s wonder that our hearts see rightly. Because everything important happens on the inside, and stories and poetry are a glimpse into that unknown.
We need more readers, more coffee, more songs on the radio, the sound of pages turning in the libraries, and more libraries while we are at it; and no more politicians or paupers—replace them with coffee mugs or a book of thesaurus.
