I’m so glad I … learned to read and write. The world opened.
I learned about shy stegosauruses and buried treasure, superpowered heroes and heroines from other worlds and down the street, and with pencil and paper I created my own world.
Words give us a portal into other minds and souls, times and places. We walk with Thoreau through Walden Woods in 1854, go whale hunting with Melville in 1851, settle into the audience at the Globe Theatre in 1603 to see what story this fellow Shakespeare has come up with now.
The twisting and shouting of everyday life and social media settles into a calm between the covers of a book, and we see the more reasoned background of hastily or imprecisely spoken words. Or our hearts are hastened by the passions on the page.
We live in a world where all of these words are at our fingertips. It’s a grand time to be alive.