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BY ROMA GONZALES
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When you open a book
WHEN you happen to see someone holding an open book, eyes gently moving from left to right and back, lips silently moving, do not, if it can be helped, bring them back to this world. They, for a moment, have become another creature lost in another time and space.
They have abandoned their anxieties in the present life, shouldering the burdens of a metaphysical being. In the pages, they can allow themselves feel emotions and fears and make choices they would not entertain otherwise beyond the softbound fences or hardbound gates. Inside the paper walls, they are safe. They have escaped.
Opening up a book is living another lifetime in the midst of the awareness of the other. Without judgment or prejudice, they are allowed inside this circle of people — imaginary or not — suspended in frozen time and space. They let you into the most secret guilt and cruelest dreams.
One can flirt among the Creoles of New Orleans, or walk the streets of Dresden before the bomb, or run among the wolves of Jack London, or dig Cathy’s grave with Heathcliff. When you can take no more of Scarlet O’ Hara’s whining or get too spooked in Big Brother’s watchful world, you just close the covers and remember to breathe.
Here it is possible that we can all speak to everyone and never meet anyone. When you open a book, you resurrect dead men at the height of their mental prowess, and sit with them, and they talk and talk and talk even when their bodies have powderized back to the earth, the brains that once housed all these crazy ideas have disintegrated into some kind of mush or some chalk that have mixed up with what was once their eyes that gazed upon the world and cried, and hearts that beat so strong. And even if you disagree or comment aloud, they will never be interrupted.
When you walk into a library, you walk into a forest. It is good that they call each page a leaf, because trees have been felled so that the tales and thoughts of men may remain relatively forever.
When you happen to see someone holding an open book, eyes gently moving from left to right and back, lips silently moving, do not, if it can be helped, disturb them in their prayer.
Happy National Reading Month!/PN
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