The constant reader

You can find it in prayer, I am told. A state of peace, of being still and completely aligned with the world around you.

I find it, too – on mountain tops, when the air and the sun feel closer to me than anywhere else, and in forests, where the trees and I are the only beings around.

And in books.

When a story finds me, there is a moment when the world falls away and time takes a breath.

I was a teenager and supposed to pay attention in class, when my mother gave me A portrait of the artist as a young man. After starting the novel, I couldn’t stop, I had to keep reading, so during math class, I placed the book on my knees under the school desk and whenever the teacher turned to the blackboard, I leaned back very slowly and very discreetly and stole a glimpse at the story, taking morsels of it, while pretending to be solving equations. Maybe I had my own first epiphany back then: this world gets better when you leave it from time to time. Then, when you come back from that other place or that other person you’ve lived in, this place has changed, too. It has become rounder, fuller, and you have become rounder and fuller, too.

After Joyce, hundreds, or thousands of other novels would follow, some haunting me for weeks. At times, pieces of these stories pop up, when I see something that reminds me of them, or talk to someone I feel like I’ve met before, and I find it comforting to have these presences within me, lingering inside the fabric of my mind.

Books, it’s true, teach us things. What’s more, they make us who we are. They are the first places where we follow our curiosity unconditionally, where we push boundaries and allow ourselves to open new doors in our heads. We absorb the things we read, and they remain with us, moving inside us and settling down somewhere. The constant reader is the constant learner, always in the making, always re-shaping themselves and their context, and, hopefully, always finding moments of peace along the way.