“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka wrote to his childhood friend just as he was setting out on a life of making and honing axes of words. I have always been struck by his metaphor — by both the exquisite truth of its tenor and the awful violence of its vehicle. A good book is indeed a profound transformation and, yes, there can be a violence to how it awakens us from the trance of near-life, but it is often a transformation of great subtlety and tenderness — an act of healing, a self-salvation, a self-creation. “Books and stories are medicine, plaster casts for broken lives and hearts, slings for weakened spirits,” Anne Lamott wrote in her lovely letter to children a century after Kafka. As a child, Jane Goodall read herself into her unexampled life. As a girl cusping on adulthood, Helen Fagin read herself alive through the Holocaust.
I always find reading a powerful experience, and way more so than watching a movie or TV program. A book is far richer and more vivid than a movie because our minds are more powerful than a video editing suite. I'm always a bit sad when I get to the end of a book. Books enrich human beings and getting into the habit of reading daily is never time lost.
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Mass, Energy, and How Literature Transforms the Dead Weight of Being: Jeanette Winterson on Why We Read#
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books
“Books read us back to ourselves… The escape into another story reminds us that we too are another story. Not caught, not confined, not predestined.”
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