The Pages

A month ago, I was at a Parisian man's house for my first Courchsurfing experience. After I had everything settled down and my belongings all put in order in my room, I decided to take a tour of the apartment. He had two balcony that looked over the city of Paris and his apartment looked just like any apartment in America. It was clean and well-kept and the best part of the apartment was the books. He had bookcases after bookcases of books that many Americans do not own. The only people I know who own that many books are the library, bookstores, or someone who works in the academia. We are living in the digital age where many people read books on flat screens rather than having an actually book in hand and it always comes as a surprise when someone has that many books.  After the man left for work one morning, my curious self decided to look through his stacks of books and I rediscover my love of reading again.

Unlike many trends, books will never go out of style. People will continue to read them years after years, whether they are in a digital form or an actual book.  Books create and record history and even is a part of history.  Currently I am re-reading the book The Diary of Anne Frank and though I have read it in the past as a kid, it still holds its uniqueness and there is always something new to be discovered at every turn of a page.  Anne's voice speaks and can be felt at every page and her thoughts and emotions live as the diary continues to be read by people. Books are like that, we cannot just read once and know everything about them. Every time we reopen a page we discover something new and something different; it is a living thing that breathe and it is wholly self-sufficient in its own way and the best part is it always bring comfort to readers.  It takes us to another place in time and takes us out of our comfort zone to the unknown.  So books are not just pages we read, they are friends who will always have new ideas and they converge them to our own thoughts, turning us into a new and a better person.