Jean Rhys
These words really stopped me in my tracks as I prepared to ponder them. I think I was ready for the bit about how reading takes us away - it enables us to go places in our minds and our imaginations; it enables us to travel to places we have never been and to imagine whole new worlds, lives and experiences.
What I hadn't expected was the second part; how reading can find homes for us everywhere.
I think what she is suggesting is that through the process of reading, of creating a place in our minds, we are essentially taking us ourselves there, and enabling us to fit in, to be part of the place, to look around and feel as if we know these people, these places, that somehow or other we belong. If only for the time it takes to read a book.
Perhaps her life as a person living between two places is the basis for the immigrant idea; and I wonder if the words spring more from her feeling not at home where she physically was, yet finding the notion of home elsewhere in her imagination and through books.
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