Thursday Thoughts...

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life …. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before. 

Katherine Patterson

Books really are about firing up the imagination, and offering us moments and opportunities for our imaginations to let loose, to wander through other people's lives; explore other cultures and other times.

It is a real wonder and joy to me that books can seriously carry you away - to have you enter into the fear; the joy; the extravagance; and the desolation.  I find it remarkable that a book can transport me far away in my imagination, and in my sense of time and place for the here and now.

Books do let you go away without going away - I often feel as if I have to shake my head a few times and re-think where I am or what I was supposed to be doing after I have been totally absorbed by a book. Re-orienting myself to here and now can take a wee while.

But truthfully, when you react to to something, identify with something or respond in a certain way to something written in a book - it can reveal truths about you and the life you are living, not any imagined one. In these moments I often stop and write down the passage that set me off; that made me think there was more to the words than just the words themselves as part of the narrative - that they held meaning for me and my world.

A little bit of my sub-tropical world…