There Is A Line Of

Unicorns, Dragons, Witches May Be Creatures Conjured Up In Dreams, But On The Page Their Needs, Joys, Anguishes, And Redemptions Should Be Just As True As Those Of Madame Bovary Or Martin Chuzzlewit.

We Read To Understand, Or To Begin To Understand. We Cannot Do But To Read. Reading Almost As Much As Breathing, Is Our Essential Function.

And Sometimes, When The Stars Are Kind, We Read With An Intake Of Breath, With A Shudder, As If Someone Or Something Had 'walked Over Our Grave,' As If A Memory Had Suddenly Been Rescued From A Place Deep Within Us - The Recognition Of Something We Never Knew Was There, Or Of Something We Vaguely Felt As A Flicker Or A Shadow, Whose Ghostly Form Rises And Passes Back Into Us Before We Can See What It Is, Leaving Us Older And Wiser.

The Telling Of Stories Creates The Real World.

In The Dark, With The Windows Lit And The Rows Of Books Glittering, The Library Is A Closed Space, A Universe Of Self-serving Rules That Pretend To Replace Or Translate Those Of The Shapeless Universe Beyond.