Words, stories, books allowed me to have not so much a quiet eye—never, perhaps, my forte when I was young—but a widened gaze at worlds I could never have imagined from my very small vantage point over Walnut Street, where I met Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë, and Margaret Mitchell for the first time. As Alberto Manguel remarked about his own similarly book-built knowledge store, “Everything proceeds in geometric progression based49 on what is known and what is remembered every time we read something new.”
