The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

Without a reader, a book was a blank slate, an object with no breath or pulse of its own. But once a book became part of someone’s world, it came to life, with a past and a present—and, if properly cared for, a future.

We read not to escape life but to learn how to live it more deeply and richly, to experience the world through the eyes of the other. —Ashlyn Greer, The Care & Feeding of Old Books

He said all truly good writing—fiction or nonfiction—has a heartbeat, a life force that comes from the writer, like an invisible cord connecting them to the reader. Without it, the work is dead on arrival.”

“You sound like a newspaperman.” “Or a man who wants to know all about you.” “And which are you?” Your frosty mantle is back in place as you study me. Still, I’m dazzled as I look at you, the way the sun creates shadows beneath your cheekbones, the play of the breeze as it lifts your hair off your face. “The latter,” I say quietly. “Very much the latter.”

To read a book is to take a journey, to travel into a vast unknown, to hear the voices of angels both living and dead.

you?” Love. The word slices into me like a blade. Neither of us has ever said it before. Me least of all. Instead, I’ve lived with the knowledge that one day, quite suddenly, it would be our last day. It would have been pointless, not to mention foolhardy, to allow my heart to wander onto such dangerous ground. Now, suddenly, the truth hits me squarely, inescapably. I’ve loved you from the very first night, the very first look, the very first lie. I let myself believe I was in command of my emotions, that I could conquer them, starve them out of existence. Now I realize that was the biggest lie of all.

My mother was a little freer with her opinions. I once heard her say Martin was so crooked, they’d have to screw him in the ground when he died.”

In the happiest times of my life, I have reached for my books. In the saddest times of my life, my books have reached back.

Reading brings us unknown friends. —Honoré de Balzac

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. —Charles W. Eliot

Now, seated on the edge of the bed, she opened her palm, tracing a fingertip along the puckered line of flesh bisecting her life line. Before and after. It was another reminder—one she vowed never to forget—that people’s lives were defined not by the scars they acquired but by what lay on the other side of those scars, by what’s done with the life they have left.