Thursday, October 21, 2010

Books are dangerous.

Don't get me wrong, reading is amazing. But books are dangerous. The world of a book is so enchanting, so addictive. Once you start to spend time with it, it starts to get a hold on you and slowly drag you in. The world of the book calls to you, luring you in slowly until you never want to leave. The world of the book becomes your reality, and it becomes torture to leave that world for any length of time for things in your old, superficial and pathetic existence. You yearn for the world in the book and cannot wait to escape back into it. When you've turned the last page and shut the cover, it's as if you've closed an ominous door, condemning you to return to your own, unsatisfying world. But though you've left the world inside the book, a piece of yourself still remains in it forever. For a time, it feels almost impossible to you that you could ever tear yourself away from the all-to-real experience of that book and step into the world of another, but your longing for new worlds eventually gets the better of you. The one amazing thing about our normal, mortal existence is that we are able to leave our own reality and experience so many other worlds. One caution is that with every new (or old) world you visit, you leave a tiny piece of yourself there. You can never completely leave any of those worlds, and though you may have forgotten some of them, tiny pieces of yourself forever remain in the worlds of all the books you have read. So you see, books are dangerous, but in such a seductively beautiful way that you cannot resist them.